


Buffering

by HelloAfternoon



Category: Homestuck
Genre: AU, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Friends to Lovers, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-16
Updated: 2015-11-25
Packaged: 2018-05-01 22:18:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 26,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5223074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HelloAfternoon/pseuds/HelloAfternoon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dave needs somebody to convince his relatives that he's not the single, lonely misanthrope that he is. John needs a new 3DS.</p><p>A Christmas spent in awkward relationship limbo, feat. Dave's family.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. bullshitting the bulshitters

Your name is Dave Strider, and your entire family is a bunch of rotten, judgmental, fussy meddlers.

This has always been a problem for you, but it has only recently become an actual pressing issue that you have to confront. Rose has noticed your weird beard, and has been pestering you about it for a couple of months. Dirk, similarly, has been making fun of you for staying cooped up in your apartment all the time. Honestly, fuck him, because sbahj comics don’t make themselves, and those nasty little MSpaint spawned disasters are your livelihood.

Well, actually, they sort of do. At this point you just re-use shitty sprites at ever increasing levels of JPG compression, but the point stands. You actually have to vomit up that nonsense at least once a week, or you can't pay rent.

You begin to suspect that Dirk and Rose have been chatting behind your back when they corner you on pesterchum and demand to know “how things have been going,” which is Strilonde code for, “how pathetic is your life right now and how much energy can I leech from your misfortune.”

Not much, really. You’re doing okay, as far as art school dropouts go. Your apartment is dirty and you’ve gained a little weight and maybe your skin is a bit blotchy compared to the way it used to be, but...who are you fucking kidding, yesterday you fell asleep at 10 pm after two cans of lukewarm Bud Light. Your life isn’t going how you want it to go.

But that isn’t your fault. If anything, Rose and Dirk are being dicks by digging up all your dirty laundry like a pair of laundry starved vultures.

In a fit of defensive panic, wherein you tried with increasingly pathetic maneuvers to overcompensate, you sort of accidentally implied that you’re dating someone. Naturally, both laundry starved vultures were immediately upon you like white on rice on a paper plate in a snowstorm. Not one to back down, you acted like you had intended to let that slip completely because, of course, it was true.

You have’t dated anyone in over two years. You’re pretty sure you don’t have more than three friends, and two of those three friends live across the globe. Jade is off galloping through some jungle somewhere, and Karkat is...doing whatever he does, which you think is just yelling in youtube videos and showering in cash ponied up by 14 year olds with immature senses of humor. You will never admit that he’s funny. Ever.

That left one friend, but that friend was a last resort. Honestly, you had considered paying a lady of the night to pretend to date you before you considered this guy.

John Egbert.

You haven’t known John for a very long time, just a little over a year with irregular contact. You’re friends, sure, and you think you could grow to be best friends, maybe...but right now he’s an internet acquaintance, and asking him would be crossing some major boundaries. Plus, the likelihood of him living close enough to your place to pretend to date you is one in a million.

Brushing all this off wasn’t too hard. As long as Dirk and Rose didn’t press for details, you could just keep up the facade for a couple of months and then pretend to be broken up with. You’re pretty sure if you broke up with your imaginary date, they’d see through you. Or maybe they’d realize you’d know that? Fuck, they’re hard to predict. There is no right answer, you’re gonna get fucked no matter what.

That is, until two weeks later, when Dirk drops the news that he and Rose are coming over for Christmas. Which is in...eight days.

Right. Cool. Okay. Man, you let this go on for two long. Two weeks of pretending to be dating someone to save your pride isn’t going to fly with them. They’re going to destroy you over this. You are going to fucking die.

So, your last resort becomes your first resort.

TG: john weve known each other for a long time now  
TG: ive been thinking  
EB: dave you woke me up.  
TG; its 2pm john you should be awake by now jesus  
TG: anyway i have a proposition for you  
TG: an offer you cant refuse  
EB: im pretty sure i can refuse it!  
TG: look shut up alright this is going to take some explaining for me to not sound like im trying desperately to get in your pants  
EB: this promises to be funny.  
TG: okay uh  
TG: so  
TG: fuck theres no way for me to say this without sounding pathetic  
TG: i have to sell myself to you like im advertising some kind of product but theres no angle or lighting that will make this appealing to you so i just gotta come out and say it  
EB: dave please.  
TG: right okay  
TG: fake date me  
EB: what?  
EB: dave did you just proposition me?  
TG: no dicknut its not real dating its fake dating get with the program  
TG: i need someone to pretend to be in love with me for three days while my family is in town  
TG: i figured id throw your lonely ass a bone  
TG: youre welcome  
EB: um! im not exactly swooning here!  
TG; look please just pretend to be dating me so my brother will stop talking about how lonely and pathetic my beard makes me look  
TG: rose is a nice nerd but dirk is a mean nerd john he doesnt pull any punches when hes clobbering the fuck out of my self esteem  
TG: i love this beard and im not shaving it off for him  
EB: oh man this is so good.  
EB: mmmm! this is so good!!!  
EB: i love this!  
TG: yeah i knew you would you sick fuck  
EB: the great dave strider. prostrate before me.  
TG: prostate before you if you want just do me this one solid  
EB: gross! no need to do that.  
EB: besides i could live in guam or something for all you know.  
EB: i could also just say no!  
TG: do you live in guam  
EB: hehe maybe!  
EB: the point is.  
EB: what is in it for me?  
TG: oh so thats how its gonna be  
TG: i dont know what do you want  
TG: and before you ask my hot body is off the table  
EB: i wouldnt want it on the table to be honest!  
EB: okay.  
EB: 200 bucks.  
TG: what are you fucking serious  
TG: i dont even know what you look like you could be some 2/10 asshole with bad table manners no way am i coughing up 200 bucks for that youd just bust up my sibling street cred even worse than it already is  
EB: 200 bucks or nothing.  
TG: dont you live in guam or something  
EB: nope! i live less than ten miles from your apartment.  
TG: wait  
TG: what  
EB: i sent you a christmas present last year i know where you live!  
EB: didnt you check the return address?  
TG: i mean not really  
TG: i didnt think youd be that close  
EB: well i am.  
EB: so.  
EB: 200 bucks.  
EB: daddy needs a new 3ds.  
TG: youre an animal  
EB: im business savvy!  
EB: supply and demand dave.  
TG: youre seriously going to make me do this  
TG; youre going to give yourself to me  
TG: for money  
EB: im not a saint.  
EB: is it a deal or not?  
TG: maybe i dont know  
TG: its a deal if we video call right now  
EB: what!  
TG: gotta scope out the meat egbert  
TG: i need to check you out really fucking thoroughly before my brother ever lays eyes on you  
EB: oh fuck you dave you dont even have a choice at this point!  
EB: you would not be talking to me right now if you had a choice.  
TG: this is a hard line in the sand im drawing here egbert  
TG: video call or no 3ds for your extorting ass  
EB: sigh!  
EB: okay fine but give me a second im in my underwear.  
TG: actually no thats better  
EB: your brother doesnt have to see me nude and you can suffer the same fate.  
TG: you are such a prude honestly  
EB: every time you insult me im going to tack on another ten bucks.  
TG: alright fine jesus ill zip my lip  
EB: great.

After about ten minutes of waiting, you answer the call.

“Hello?” a voice says to you. It’s high pitched and raspy, like someone voicing a cartoon character. You are briefly completely stunned by it. You have never heard anyone with a voice that silly before in your life.

Then the video clears up a bit, and a young man standing in his room is revealed to you. “Dave? Is that you?”

Oh my God, he is so fucking tiny.

It’s absurd how tiny he is. He’s so small. You have to press your hand up to your mouth to keep a laugh from bubbling out of your pokerface because he is just...oh my god, he’s so fucking small! You have literally seen girl scouts his size.

You can’t hold it back. You lean back in your chair and wail out a reluctant laugh through your hand, kicking your feet helplessly. This is just...this is too good. Fate as smiled down upon you this day.

“Dave, oh my god, shut up!” his crappy baby voice shouts at you. Tears are coming out of your eyes because he sounds like a parakeet under duress. You are writhing in your computer chair so hard that it’s squeaking underneath you. You could have imagined no better outcome.

“Yeah, well, your shirt is stupid and your dick is tiny!” he shouts, putting up both of his tiny middle fingers at you.

“You’re a grown man,” you wheeze. “You are twenty four years old!”

“Shut up!

“You look and sound like a loony toon!”

“Your mom looks like a loony toon!”

You are almost screaming. That’s the level of how funny this is to you. Somehow you thought he’d be...some huge tall nerd. But no, he’s a pint sized nerd. Barely a pint. More like a cup.

“Three hundred bucks!” he shouts. You reign in your laughter out of economic coercion.

“No, no, John, baby, I’m sorry…” you wheeze, leaning on your desk, eyes watering so you have to wipe them under your shades. “Don’t bankrupt me, please.”

“Three hundred bucks, you jerk!” he says, resolute and frowning, pointing both of his middle fingers at you.

He’s so small. His hair is short and black and wild, and his glasses are about as huge and square as you would’ve hoped. The bottoms of the glasses are rimless, but the tops have a heavy black border on them. They looks like old man glasses or some shit. It seems like he has a bunch of tattoos on his arms, but its hard to tell with the video being as low quality as it is.

“You're like a smurf,” you say, rather quietly, enamored with how silly he looks.

“A three hundred dollar smurf,” he grumbles, flushed. He’s wearing a black tank top and a pair of briefs. Huh, you guess he didn’t...put on pants, just a shirt. Keeping it classy.

You put your head in your hands as a very somber realization spills over you like a bucker of ice water. You are going to have to pay this very smurf 300 dollars to pretend to date you. You do not have a choice but to do that. In addition, you are going to have to coach him, and then introduce him to your family. They are never, ever, ever going to let you live this down. You hyped him up so much, and he is going to disappoint so hard. A feeble little giggle escapes you.

"I’m so fucked,” you grumble.

“Yeah you are. Who shit talks the guy they're paying to date them?”

“How tall are you?”

"That’s none of your business!” he says.

“John, c’mon, we’re friends-”

“I’m 5’4.”

“-ohhhh my god, holy shit, how’s life in munchkin land-”

“Dave! Stop!”

“I mean I’m not huge, but I'm statistically average, you know? Like, you really got the short end of the biological stick here, dude, sorry to say…”

“Okay, mister statistically average,” he says, words accompanied by massive air quotes, “are we doing this or not? Because at this point I have half a mind to leave you flapping in the breeze!”

“You wouldn’t ditch me like that, would you man? C’mon, we’re friends!”

“We’re about to be enemies,” he says, very flatly and in that voice of his, and you choke back a laugh.

“Okay, yeah, I get it. I’ll stop being a dick.”

“Thank you,” John says, sighing and pulling up his computer chair. He sits down in it and adjusts his webcam. Man, are his eyes that blue or is it the screen? You can’t tell. He bites his lip with his big crooked teeth.

“Okay, so, I guess you pass onto round 2, and then round 3, and then the finals, and then you win, because there are no other contestants and I’m desperate,” you say, leaning back and crossing your arms. This isn’t ideal, but at least it’s something. Rose is going to notice that he’s not to total hottie you described when you were playing up your fictional relationship with him like you were newlyweds, but he’ll do.

He’s...realistic, you guess?

“Wow, what an honor,” he says, flatly, in his ridiculous voice, and you almost crack up. The way he talks is funny, and you don’t just mean his voice, but...his delivery. He’s very animated, so when he comes off as really dry it’s like watching a heart monitor flatline. It’s that kind of sudden, dramatic change.

“It is. Do you have any idea-”

“How many people have crawled up your dick only to reach a point in the atmosphere where the air was too thin to breathe, pass out, and fall to the deaths? Dave, shut up.”

You snort. “Okay, yeah, sorry.”

Suddenly, you feel a bit assuaged. At least hanging out with John will be fun, even if you get majorly humiliated in front of your judgmental kin.

Nevermind, that’s still stressing you the fuck out, but at least, you know, one of the cards turned out to be in your favor. You like John more than most strangers.

“So, my paypal is-” he starts. You crack up.

“Oh, that fast, huh?”

He gives you a sly look over the top of his glasses.

"Okay, okay. Tell me your paypal.”

He does. You write it down.

“If you fucking scam me for 300 bucks and then ditch me forever I’m going to hunt you down and shit in your mouth while you sleep,” you say as you complete the paypal transaction.

“I’m not that much of a jerk, Dave, jeez!” he says, as he checks to make sure you sent him to right amount of cash with a skeptical look on his face.

Seriously?

“Okay, done...and done,” he says, pretending to dust off his hands. “We’re good. So, I guess it’s a little late for me to ask, but what exactly does this dating nonsense entail beyond the usual handholding and stuff?”

“Well,” you start, furrowing your brows. Honestly, you hadn’t really thought that far ahead. Mostly there was just a lot of blind panic. Now comes the hard part.

Training John.

“You have to spend three days at my apartment. Activities include, but are not limited to, sharing a living space with me, learning a few things about me, kissing my cheek or holding my hand, and, uh…” you struggle with this one. “Maybe sharing a bed? But only because Dirk and Rose are probably going to share the foldout couch.”

John appears to be mulling it over. “Do we have to share a bed? I mean, we’ve never met in person, so I don’t know...”

“It’s okay if you don’t want to,” you amend, hurriedly. “Like, I know this is weird and I’m just an internet pal who you suddenly have to act way way overly chummy with, but...yeah. Y’know, boundaries are boundaries. As long as you’re a believable boyfriend, it’s all good.”

John nods solemnly.

“Do you want me to come over and practice or something?” he asks. “I mean, I’ve never even seen your apartment, and if I show up and I don’t know anything about the place where you live despite living only a few miles away, it might look fishy.”

“This is going to look fake as hell no matter how we spin it, but yeah. Might as well go all the way.”

“In the meantime, before I make good on earning those 300 dollars,” he says, leaning back in his chair smugly while your wallet cries for help, “how about a good ol’ round of 20 questions? Basic stuff, so I don’t get caught not knowing your favorite flavor of oatmeal or something.”

“I know a lot about you, I think,” you say, rubbing your chin.

“You don’t know my Dad’s name, or anything about my past relationships. Stuff like that is stuff you’d know about someone you were dating!”

Ugh, fuck, he’s right. He’s super annoyingly right about this. You’re going to have to learn about more than just his interests and his sense of humor. You’re going to have to get deep with this guy. You are going to have to Get To Know John Egbert.

“I should also fill you in on my family,” you grumble, “because they’re a bunch of fucking assholes and I don’t want them to grill anything out of you.”

John snorts. “You talk about them like they’re FBI agents or something!”

“More like invasive, crooning, elderly relatives who wont stop asking about my marital status and ideas on having children.”

“Oh, man, That’s my Dad to a T,” John says, sighing exasperatedly. “He keeps sending me these grammatically correct emails gently asking me how I’m doing in my search for a job,” he rambles, "and it’s like, Dad, I have a job. I literally have a job, you just don’t think it’s a real job-”

“You have a job?”

“Wh-Yes! I have a job!” John says, looking offended and crossing his tattoo littered arms. “I’m...well, technically I’m a lot of things,” he grumbles, looking away. “Alright, maybe the job is…look, I was a game art major in college, alright?” he grouses. “I make games!”

You’re a little shocked.

“Like...video games?”

“Yeah, dingdong! I mean, shitty ones, but it’s hard to make anything good with five whole people working on an entire project,” he sighs. “I mean if it’s indie stuff it’s not a huge deal, but the last big project I worked on only had 5 environment artists. There wasn’t anything in that shitty game I didn’t touch. I almost severed several friendships over that thing. it was bananas!”

“So...what do you do specifically?”

"Oh, a little of this, a little of that,” he says, “I mean, I could explain it all to you, I guess, but I’m supposed to be an environment artist or a lighting artist. I get thrown into tons of other stuff, though."

“Shit, dude,” you say, "I just make webcomics.”

“Don’t feel bad,” he says. “I sort of graduated super early because I was really good at this stuff. People my age don’t usually have jobs like the jobs I’ve had.” he smiles. “Besides, webcomics are cool.”

“Thanks,” you say. “I’m...pretty cool.”

Wow, that was some of the nerdiest shit that has ever come out of your mouth. Are you twelve or what?”

John snorts. “Yeah, only cool people have to insist on their own coolness 24/7.”

“Okay, so, twenty questions or whatever. Lets do this,” you say, slapping your hands together. “Dad’s name?”

“James. Dad’s name?”

You shake your had. “No Dad, just Bro. His name was Bro, the best thing you can do is not ask questions,” you say.

The rest of the evening goes like that. You learn a lot of things about John, but mostly just that his sense of humor is pretty great, and that you think he’s way funnier than you should. You don’t know if thinking he’s funny is ironic or not, but you like to imagine that it is. His tattoos seem to be mostly cliche nerd shit, and as he shows them to you, you sort of forget this is a payed obligation rather than him just talking to you like a friend.

Which is what he is. He’s your friend. Your tiny, cool friend.

Well, maybe not cool in the way that you’re cool, but in the way that really counts. He’s a good guy. When he talks about bad things he’s done, it’s all about him accidentally cursing at someone in a fit of road rage form inside his car, or failing to open a door for someone. Being nice comes naturally to him.

You also learn tons of less relevant stuff about him that would be forgettable if he weren’t so good at telling stories. You learn that he used to date a girl because they went to juvy together, and that he used to high five his Dad during certain parts of Con Air, which he now insists is his least favorite movie of all time. He talks about his child self like he was the worst human ever ever, despite currently being the worst human ever, and mentions that the girl he dated from juvy slashed his Dad’s tires when they broke up a year ago.

You leave the conversation slightly more relaxed. You’re still anticipating the humiliation when you introduce him to Dirk and Rose and they rip him apart from head to toe, or, god forbid, find out you’re faking, but...at least if you get eviscerated, he’ll be there, and you can laugh about it like bros in stead of mourning the loss of your dignity by yourself. At least you’ll have a friend. God knows you’ve been alone in this apartment for a very, very long time.


	2. practice makes perfect

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> they try really hard. or not actually very hard at all.

The next day, since you have to hurry things along, you invite him to come over. Your messy apartment has to be dealt with, you figure. You normally don’t clean up much for Dirk and Rose, but John has never seen your place and you’d like to fake being an adult for at least a little while, so you throw out all the old takeout tins and put all of your clothes in a pile in a corner of your room. You spray some air freshener, which just makes the place smell like BO and “moon musk,” whatever a musky moon smells like.

You put on a clean T shirt and vow to go to the laundromat at some point when he rings the doorbell. You peek out through the peephole and see the top of his head. You snort.

“Who is it?” you singsong.

“Dave, come on, it’s me, John!” he grouses. “I know this is your apartment, you wrote your name on a piece of note paper and stuck it to the door.”

“I’m not decent!”

“Too bad, here I come-” he says, and you realize too late that you left the door unlocked for him.

"Fuck,” you hiss, as he tries to force his way in and you battle him at the door, giggling wildly.

"Oh my fucking God, are you five? Get out of the way!” he says, but he’s laughing in between grunting effort noises, jamming his leg in the door and wedging himself through the gap so you can’t slam it shut. “Please don’t shut the door on my nuts,” he whines, legs parted right over the doorframe.

"I could fucking castrate you right now with this door,” you gloat, leaning all of your weight on it to keep him there. He’s alarmingly strong despite his tiny size, which is even more impressive in person.

“Please don’t," he whines, defeated and stuck.

You swing it open suddenly and he topples onto the ground with a heavy thud, his limbs flinging comically into the air like Charlie Brown attempting to kick a nonexistent football.

“Dave!” he screeches, looking indignant form the floor, glasses all crooked.

Wow, his eyes really are just that blue. Huh. It’s sort of stunning for a second. Maybe they just look like that because of his glasses, or...that kind of dark, stormy, romantic blue just occurs in nature. This isn’t a pulp romance novel, you shouldn't be waxing poetic of his stormy, gem-like eyes. You could start calling them sapphires and get hard about how impossible deep and bright they are.

But they’re just eyes. Just impressively, nicely blue eyes.

“What?’ you ask, face deadpan, pretending none of that happened as you politely close the door behind him.

“You’re a prick,” he says, getting up and looking around your apartment. “Wow, this place is a sty!”

“Fuck you man, I’m an artist,” you say, “we need our organized chaos.”

“Your apartment is ugly and your beard is stupid,” he says, too easily. You twitch at him, annoyed. “Okay, so, tour time!” He says, clapping his hands together and looking suddenly enthusiastic.

“At least I have a beard,” you grouse under your breath. “Your face is like a freshly shaven baby’s ass, you twelve year old lookin’ motherfucker.”

“You don’t shave a baby’s ass, Dave,” he chides, wagging a finger at you. You get a closer look at all his tattoos. They look pretty good, except he has a tetris block tattoo, and tons of other annoying geeky tattoos…Jesus. They're actually sort of terrible. You can see at least one R2D2.

“You are what is killing geek culture.”

“There is no such thing as geek culture,” he rebuts.

He does not, to his credit, actually look twelve, in spite of your claims to the contrary. Maybe a bit baby-faced, but he looks like a college student, at least. He’s got stubble and an adult's shoulders, with big hands and long legs. Or, at least, long compared to the rest of him, which is pretty squat. You resist the urge to lean on him like a piece of furniture.

He looks around your apartment for a while. You familiarize him with the silverware drawers, which contain no silverware, because all of your dishes are dirty. He looks grossed out, but also sympathetic. Yes, he's also a dude in his mid twenties, don’t pretend he's better.

“I’m not sleeping here,” he says, as soon as he sees your bedroom.

You snort. “It’s not that bad.”

He gives you a shocked look. “What about it isn’t that bad?” he says, gesturing wildly through the doorway at your bedchamber. “The fucking...the mess, the bugs in jars, the weird creepy pictures? Or maybe that thing...what is that? Dave, what the hell is that?”

He’s pointing at that fetus you have in a jar.

“Oh, that. Rose gave it to me for Christmas a few years back. It’s not real,” you reply, trying to calm him down, but he just looks more bemused. “It’s not real, John,” you say, as slowly and condescendingly as you can manage.

“Oh, fuck off, it’s weird! I’m not doing this!”

“Three hundred bucks, John. You’re mine now.”

“That sounded so creepy, please never say it again."

“You’re mine.”

“Stop,” he says, pointing a finger at you in what is probably some kind of warning. You grab it.

“Mine.”

After a moment of absorbing the angry look he’s giving you, you realize that this could be construed as flirting, and what you are doing could be smudged to sound like hand holding.

“Uh,” you say, suddenly feeling a bit awkward. “You wanna practice holding hands?” you ask.

He grabs your hand and squeezes it so hard you actually bend over and make weird noises trying to squirm away from him. He has an impressive grip strength.

"I’m holding your hand, Dave!” he shouts at you as you crumple on the floor, laughing and sobbing and begging him to let go. It has been a long time since anyone has roughhoused with you.

After that, you settle down and chat for a while and he decides to make lunch since it’s 3pm, and that’s apparently Egbert lunch time. You are woefully low on sustenance that isn’t beer or condiments, but he digs up some Star Wars easy mac and goes about making it while you flip through your case of illegally downloaded and burned movies.

When you come back to the kitchen, it is to a peculiar smell It’s almost like cooked oatmeal, which is not what mac n cheese smells like ordinarily.

“John, what the fuck?” you say. He’s standing in front of your microwave, giving you a deer in the headlights stare. “Dude, what happened?”

“Uh…” he says, and points at the microwave.

The bowl inside has a large, white dome on it big enough to be mistaken for it’s mirror image. “What the hell?” you grumble, walking up to it and squinting.

“I microwaved milk in it.”

You stare at him. He looks unrepentant, and shrugs hard enough that his shoulders practically touch his ears.

“You have add the milk afterward, you fucking-how do you not know this?”

“It’s fine!” he says. “I’m sure it’s edible.”

“John, you can’t microwave milk for eleven minutes,” you say, barely believing that you have to explain how to make easy mac to a dude who went to college at one point in his life.

The resulting mac n cheese is inedible. It is covered in a thick white film that makes it look like someone smeared glue on it, and it smells weird. You deep it poisonous, and John scrapes it into the trash as you get him a bag of chips to satiate him until he goes home.

After that, the two of you watch a movie and ask each other more questions. His favorite color is green, and he likes ghostbusters, and he’s read every Goosebumps book.

You tell him eagerly about your taxidermy shit and he acts all creeped out. He talks about his ex, and how she used to collect tarantulas. You don’t understand how thats not way worse.

“This question stuff is alright, but we haven’t really gotten to the meat of this yet,” you say, as he pops Predator into the DVD player. He loves this movie, apparently.

“What do you mean?” he asks, flopping down onto the couch with you. This whole thing has been oddly comfortable and easy. You guess you knew him better than you thought.

“I mean, like, uh,” you aren’t sure how to bring this up. “Intimacy and shit.”

“Intimacy and shit,” he mocks. “You make it sound so appealing.”

“Says Mr. nike sandals and khaki shorts,” you grouse back at him. He shoots you a depreciating look and you shrug. “I’m just saying, maybe get used to snuggling up to me or something. Rose is going to want to see some yaoi.”

“Ugh,” he says. Then he leans over and flops his upper body into your lap so hard it startles you a bit.

The good news is that the two of you already converse really naturally. It’s easy to be around him, and that's the first step to seeming convincing. You doubt that Rose or Dirk even think you have any friends, so this should throw them through a loop and assist your case.

You put a hand on John’s shoulder. His skin is chilled-he always seems a bit cold-but soft. He’s in better shape than you, but only marginally. It occurs to you very suddenly that he’s an adult man. A single adult man. And so are you. And that what you’re doing is pretty weird.

You spend a little more time watching movies and getting used to physical contact. A lot of this means him swinging his leg somewhere it shouldn't be and laughing at your discomfort, or wrestling. There’s a lot of wrestling. You mostly win because of all the strife practice, but he’s stronger than he looks and pinches the back of your neck so hard that you can’t move.

The day after that, he comes back over. This time, you actually let him into the apartment, and he knows his way around already. You quiz each other on personal facts, and it’s easy to get them all right. Surprisingly easy, given your awful track record with being considerate and remembering things about people.

You are an asshole. This why you only have three friends.

John’s cartoon voice is really funny when he’s commentating over movies, so you laugh a lot while he does that. You pretend not to laugh, but you do. It just escapes you sometimes in short bursts, and he grins every time like he’s just accomplished something really grand. At some point he insists on trading glasses so you can see how bad his eyesight is.

It is so fucking bad. You entire world goes out of focus, and everything is super far away. You can only see stuff when it’s a couple inches from your face,and the entire thing makes you squint and feel an oncoming headache.

“Shit, bro, you’re practically blind,” you whine, pushing them up onto the top of your head so you can look at him as he slides on your anime shades.

He snorts. “These are so dumb.”

“Family heirloom,” you say, shrugging.

“You know what I got as a family heirloom?” he says, facing you, eyebrows high on his head and eyes concealed behind the shades. “238 porcelain clowns.”

You laugh.

“It’s not funny, I still have them. I literally can’t pay anyone to take them off my hands.”

“You could probably fashion them into some kind of postmodern art.”

He stares at you for a moment, and then pushes the shades on top of his head, squinting at you with his eyes that are just that fucking blue. He’s making a silly face, all scrunched up and concentrated. You snort.

"What?”

He leans in closer, so close you can see every hair in his eyebrows, see the slight shine to his lips where he licked them. You try not to look, because you don’t want him to catch you looking and make this weird. You thinking about it is making you feel weird. Stop thinking about potentially feeling weird, it’s making you feel weird.

“Your eyes…”

“They’re red, I know.”

He leans back, looking speculative. “Like…”

“Blood, or some other equally nerdy shit I used to compare them to in my self insert fanfiction when I was thirteen,” you supply.

“Or red M&Ms, or poppies, or bell peppers,” he continues. “Or, you know, blood, which comes from your tortured emo soul.”

“Darkness, Imprisoning me-”

“All that I see, absolute horror-”

And the two of you chant Metallica lyrics at each other like idiots for a couple of minutes before you give him back his glasses so he’ll stop squinting and looking lost in general.

“We should try kissing,” you blurt, without rally thinking.

Well, you should! You should practice at least once. You really should do that.

John looks stunned for a moment, and then scoffs. “Yeah, okay. You just ate a bag of Funions, so thanks but no thanks.”

“What if I brushed my teeth, then would I be up to your impossibly high standards?”

He gives you a dry look. “Okay, but no tongue. If you put your tongue in my mouth I’m walking out that door.”

You give him a thumbs up, nerves tingling a little, and rush to go brush your teeth. While you are doing that, no thoughts cross your mind. None. You guess that’s good, because kissing someone out of obligation isn’t exactly a huge event, and he’s getting payed, anyway. It’s just a kiss.

You sit down on the couch with him before you’re really ready. You face him completely, and its like the time you took brushing your teeth wasn’t enough time, wouldn't have been enough time if it had been hours. He turns and faces you like this is a part in a middle school party and the bottle he spun landed on you. You’re glad to be wearing your shades, because you imagine your expression to be...really something right now.

“I’ve never kissed someone with a beard before,” he says, pensive. He’s a lot less affected by this than you are, which is annoying. You wish he’d at least look nervous.

Or, no, that might be worse. Yeah, one of you has to float this thing.

“How are we going to do this? Just...go for it, and roll with the punches?” he asks, like the two of you are doing a science lab together.

"Yeah, just...do you want to kiss me, or should I kiss you?”

“Do you want to do it?”

“Do you?”

"Oh my god, you’re being so dumb, seriously. I’m getting paid, you don’t have to act all shy,” he snorts. “Fine, I’ll do it. Just hold still and try not to let your coolkid facade melt onto the floor.”

He grabs the sides of your face with his hands and you are suddenly aware of how sweaty your back is. It’s probably the sweatiest a human back has ever been, and you hope it won’t show through your shirt. You’ve always been a sweaty guy.

Fuck, that isn’t even relevant. Stay on the same page, Dave.

Oh, shit, he’s leaning in.

Should you pucker? What the fuck, is this middle school? You’ve kissed people before, don’t...do what you're doing right now. Pucker, but not like you're doing it now, your mouth probably looks like a cat’s asshole. No, stop.

Fuck, it’s happening already. You weren’t prepared.

His lip aren’t soft and there are no fireworks. He’s being gentle, and you know you must feel tense under him. Honestly, you aren’t really a physical intimacy kind of guy, and this sort of thing flusters you a bit. You just never got much physical affection when you were a kid, you guess, if you want to get all child psychology about it.

John tilts his head and kisses you politely. You can only describe it as a polite kiss. One of obligation; soft and considerate, but completely devoid of any desire to push things further. He does not press into you or lick your lip. He just gives you a nice, chaste, businesslike kiss, and leans back, opening his eyes.

“Dave, calm down, that was terrible,” he says, laughing at you.

“Excuse me for being weirded out by the notion of kissing you,” you grumble, annoyed.

“You suggested this! Jesus, shut up. Okay, one more time. You kiss me this time, maybe then you won’t be such a cold fish.” he pauses. “Also, your beard is horrible.”

“Shut up,” you grouse. You put your hands on his shoulders and he makes a show of leaning in, lips puckered like a kid. You snort and put a hand over his mouth. “Stop, dickhead, we gotta be convincing, remember?”

“We have a few more days to perfect this, Dave. It’s no biggie!” he says. His raspy voice has grown on you quite a lot. Now it’s almost comforting in stead of annoying.

“Yeah, but I may not actually want to spend every waking moment in your presence, so pucker up proper, Egbert, or I want a refund.”

He sighs, somewhat dramatically, rolling his eyes. “Okay, fine. Come get me, big cat daddy,”

You almost spit because the laugh jumps out of you, completely unbidden. "Don’t do that. Don't call me daddy.”

"Okay, okay, just get it over with!”

“Here comes big cat daddy,” you grumble, leaning in and pressing your lips to his. It’s less weird this time, but not really any better. You’re just slightly more confident now that you’ve kissed him and no meteors have come crashing down from the sky to end Earth as a celestial body, sending it hurtling into the sun where you can finally, mercifully, be incinerated.

You draw back with a wet little noise, feeling more dazed and fuzzy than you’d like to admit, and his eyes are already open.

“You suck at kissing,” he says.

“I’m usually much better at this, I swear,” you say, before you can stop yourself, knowing EXACTLY how that must sound coming out of your mouth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this might be hard to believe but i actually cut a shitload of dialogue about obi wan looking a lot like johns dad from this. it was completely pointless and had to go on top of being really bizarre
> 
> up soon: dirk and rose!


	3. goffik angel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> dave gives john the deets on his family and they go to the airport

The next day John only visits for a couple of hours.

Honestly, you’ve begun to look forward to hanging out with him. It’s easy and makes time go quicker. You like him a lot, he's a good dude.

You spend this day going over stuff about Dirk and Rose.

“Okay, so,” you begin, squirting sriracha into a bowl of maruchan ramen that is sitting on your sloppy kitchen counter, “Rose first. She’s my...cousin type thing. It’s hard to say definitively if we’re related biologically or not.”

You turn around and join John at the table. He’s also slurping at some cheap ramen noodles with hot sauce in them, and they fog up his glasses when he gets too close to the bowl. He looks up and nods, reminding you that he’s listening.

“She’s a writer. She’s been published a couple times, and has generally been met with some pretty considerable success, given her humble origins as a gay wizard smut writer,” you say. John snorts a bit and almost coughs up some of his food. “She, like most people in my family, has an innate and annoying love of extended metaphors and psychology. So get ready to be psychoanalyzed,” you say, taking a bite of your food.

John swallows and smiles at you. “Not much to analyze, I guess. I’m a simple guy!” he says with a goofy grin that touches his eyes. It’s hard not to smile when he smiles, even after you’ve spent years cultivating that exact skill.

“Yeah, well, she’ll dig around and find some kind of weird oedipus shit in your childhood, I promise. She’s not as hardcore about it as she used to be, but i think she’s just naturally like that.”

“She seems...interesting.”

“Yeah, well, you haven’t even heard about Dirk.”

And there is so much to say about your brother. You’re close to him, probably closer than you are to anyone else, but he’s a creep. A total weirdo. If he weren’t so smart you’d be concerned for his safety.

“He’s the…better Strider, I guess, if you go by loser nerd rules that no one goes by,” you say through a mouthful of ramen, gesturing with your disposable plastic fork. “Motherfucker went to Yale. He does...oh my god, get this,” you say, swallowing. “The son of a bitch does architecture, right? But he programs genuine AI in his basement in his spare time, like, as a hobby. He’s a fucking animal.”

John’s eyes go wide. “Wow, that’s some smart people stuff! Like, Hal 300 or something?”

“Fuck yeah,” you say. “He’s the Strider crown jewel. Followed in Bro's footsteps better than I ever did, shitty footsteps though they were. He also has a habit of picking people apart from the inside out, so I guess just…there’s not really a way to prepare for it, just try not to eat shit when he does something really weird.”

“I’ll try!” John says, looking like he will actually put in genuine effort. “I guess I should tell you some stuff about my family, then,” he mutters, looking into his bowl. “Uh, well…”

“What, you got some closeted skeletons, there, Egbert?” you scoff.

“Not really, just...I mean, don’t go spreading this around, okay? I have enough trouble as it is,” he sighs, suddenly looking significantly bummed.

It weird to see him look solemn. You hadn’t though about it before, but...you’ve never seen him sad. Well, not sad, just...not peppy. He’s usually an experience of a person, projecting outwardly so hard that it’s difficult to think of him as anything but a noisy joke machine. But right now, right in front of you, he’s looking into his food with this calm, pensive look on his face, biting his lip, and suddenly you realize what a full and complete person he is.

Which makes you feel like sort of a jerk because obviously he’s a complete person, obviously he has more than just one setting. You just haven’t seen it before. God, you're the worst kind of friend. You have literally never, not ever for a second, thought about John Egbert's problems.

“My last name isn’t actually Egbert,” he says. “Well, it sort of is, it’s my mothers last name. Or it was before she married my dad, and before she died,” he explains.

“Oh," you mutter, feeling a little awkward. You never had a mother to lose, and Bro’s death certainly didn’t feel like a mother’s might’ve, so you have no way of knowing what he’s feeling. “Harsh.”

“Not really, I mean...I was young, I don’t remember much about her,” he says, shrugging, although you feel like it’s more complicated than that, because nothing like that ever really gets solved quick and goes down easy. You know, you’ve had your own share of family problems. Bro was a terrible parent to you and Dirk, and you’re never going to be able to get away from that. It’s a part of you now, just like, you assume, John’s mother's death is a part of him.

He’s quick to smile, though. "It’s no biggie! I mean, me and my Dad get up to some trouble by ourselves, and he’s pretty cool for a fifty six year old bachelor,” John snorts. You smile. “My actual last name is Crocker.”

You stare at him for a moment, almost uncomprehending. “As in…”

“Betty,” he says, with a sneer. Spite sounds funny in his voice and looks funny on his face. You chuckle. “Betty, as in, giant baking empire, Betty. Empress of baked goods, Betty. My….grandma. My grandma, Betty Crocker.”

“Wait, wait…” If this means what you think it means-

“I’m one of the two living heirs to a multi billion dollar corporation spanning the globe? Yeah,” he jeers. “It’s a charmed life,” he grouses, sounding both sincere and somehow sarcastic.

“So what the fuck are you doing making shitty indie games and barely paying rent?”

“I have a sister,” he says, shrugging. “Half sister, actually. Jane. She’s going to take over. I’m just...the spare, you know? Heir and a spare.”

“Wow.”

“Plus, Jane is way cuter than me,” he says, getting back on track and making a broad gesture.

“You’re pretty cute, man, I dunno,” you add.

He makes a pleased, faux-humble expression. “Runs in the family. We’re all unassuming, adorable people. Looks less like we exploit workers overseas.”

“Dark.”

“Money is dark.”

You pause. “Is that why you aren’t going to take over? I assume you could, unless you’re excruciatingly incompetent or something.”

“Yeah, and that has nothing to do with it,” he says, pointing his fork at you with angry little punctuating jabs. “It’s just...hard stuff. You do bad things when you work for a company that big. I mean, maybe it’s dumb because...that’s just life in the US, I guess? But things get bad when a company gets that big, and I don't want any part in it.”

“Oh,” you say, quite eloquently, the mood suddenly plummeting. John fidgets.

"Sorry. This is why I don’t talk about this stuff, it strays into tragic backstory territory pretty quick,” he says, smiling somewhat sheepishly. “My background isn’t really much to talk about. I grew up in a nice, big house, with a stay at home Dad in the suburbs of Washington. Not much thrill there.”

“Better that than what I got stuck with,” you snort. “Bro was a nightmare.”

He looks at you, and senses something, and quite mercifully lets you leave it at that. “I bet,” he says, and swallowing another mouthful of ramen, before proclaiming himself full and helping you do what's left of the dishes. He flicks water up at you about every eight seconds and by the end of it you want to drown him.

The fifth day sneaks up on you faster than you would like. John comes over with a suitcase in tow and the two of you go over a checklist.

“We practiced hugging, kissing, cuddling, and pet names,” you say, going over the list mentally, ticking things off on your fingers.

“We sucked at the pet names,” he says, opening his little suitcase (which is made in the image of R2D2 and was probably marketed toward children) and pulling out a rubber band. He snaps it at you. What the fuck.

“Did you just-”

“We have to come up with something better than ‘big cat daddy,’ ‘six pack,’ and ‘hunk heartbreaker.’”

“Fucking...shut up, your suggestions weren’t any better,” you grouse, offended. He didn’t even mention your favorites. “Palhoncho isn’t even a word.”

“I thought pennis the menace was pretty good,” he says. Crap, that is pretty good.

“We’ll just have to roll with it, dude. Unless we come up with some groundbreaking new way to pretend to be in love, this is what we’re gonna have to work with.”

“Maybe I’ll call you...” he purses his lips and squints his eyes, pretending to think. “Nyan neko sugar dick.”

“No,” you reply, as flatly as you can manage, hoping to muster some of that intimidation factor that Striders are supposed to have. John looks nonplussed.

“Well, whatever. I guess I’m sleeping on the floor in your room?”

"Or the bed, dude, I don’t give a fuck!” you shout, making a grand gesture that is 50% “fuck off” and 50% “you are welcome in my home.” “Mi casa e su casa.”

“Did you wash your sheets?” he asks, looking all skeptical at you.

You are offended. Of course you washed your sheets. Had to get rid of The Smell.

“Yes, John, as per your request, the sheets have been washed, the pillows have been fluffed, and I’ll lay naked in wait for you in the afternoon with a chinese finger trap on the end of my dick,” you reply. “your dick goes in the other end of the finger trap,” you clarify.

“Your tiny dick trap notwithstanding, that sounds okay. I even brought my jammies!”

While you are still reeling from the fact that this adult man just said “jammies” out loud, he whips them out.

“Where do you even find a spiderman onesie in an adult size,” you breathe, sort of taken aback by what you're seeing right now.

He looks sheepish. “It may or may not be...extra large child size.”

“Ohhhh my god…” you whisper.

“I’m sort of excited about this actually!” he says, folding his “jammies” up and putting them back in his suitcase. “I mean, we’ve been hanging out a lot lately, but I haven’t slept over at someones house in...well, at least a couple weeks, but, you know. This time because it’s fun, not because of work!”

“You sleep over at-”

“Sol’s place, mostly,” he fills in.

“Right.”

You’re pretty nervous, honestly. John coming over is fun and entertaining, and has been serving as a decent enough distraction from your imminent humiliation, but at the end of the day, he still has to pass as your boyfriend for three days straight under the merciless scrutiny of Thing 1 and Thing 2.

Not that you don’t love them both, but honestly, they’re exhausting. You just can’t keep up with their nonsense. You’re a slow moving dude. You like things simple, but they never are.

You end up being so angry about all of this that you spend the remainder of the evening just sitting on the couch drawing SBAHJ comics while John talks over the movie. He does that a lot. He’ll reenact all the scenes. You can just watch him in stead of the tv, honestly. It’s pretty much like watching the movie, except now Macaulay Culkin has been replaced by a small nerd wearing a fake jersey from some sports anime you've never seen. 

It’s so easy to be around him. You could spend a lot of time like you’re spending it right now. That thought occurs to you, and you decide to just..savor things. You decide to really enjoy sitting on the couch next to John, being talked at, drinking a room temperature soda and doodling. It’s one of those moments that make you appreciate things, like singing Sweet Home Alabama with Dirk in the dar with the windows rolled down, or walking to the gas station to get a snack when it's cold outside, or sitting on the hood of your Ford Pinto in a Macy's parking lot at night and looking up into the light pollution while Rose reads her newest book to you over the phone. Good stuff.

It’s just one of those times. And those times are few, and they’re important, especially when you look back and see nothing but the spaces between them.

Eventually, you and John go to bed. You have to pick up Rose at the airport pretty early, but you’re sure Dirk already has some kind of plan for getting home. He’ll probably take a cab at like 8 in the morning so he can get the drop on you or some shit like that. He’s a weird guy.

John puts his jammies on and you wait for him to leave the bathroom. When he does, it's with a grand gesture and a singsong, “all yours,” topped with the tip of an invisible top hat.

Your bed is pretty big, but it feels a lot smaller with someone else in it. It’s a little awkward, honestly. You guess you know John well enough, and you like him, but it still feels weird to have somebody else in your space. You fart here. It’s yours.

But it isn’t long before your buzzing mind quiets and you can just lie there in peace, staring up at the ceiling. Your light sensitive eyes are most comfortable like this, when it’s almost completely dark, save for the little plastic glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to the ceiling and the corners of the furniture as to avoid injury in nighttime ventures to the bathroom. John’s breathing is almost silent, but sounds so unlike yours that you can’t help but listen to it.

Then you feel one of his feet touch your leg. At first it shocks you, because it’s ice cold. The cold pad of his foot seeks out warmth and scoots under your thigh.

And you fall asleep like that, with one of John Egbert's feet stuck under your leg.

When you do actually wake up, its because someone is slapping your chest. You almost panic, ready for Bro to drop down from the ceiling, but it’s just John.

“Get up, dumbass, we have to pick Rose up from the airport!” he whispers urgently, dawn barely cracking open outside, bleeding minimal light in through the blinds that you always have drawn. The sheets are all pushed to the bottom of the bed. It must’ve gotten warm last night. “Also, you laid on my ankle and now it hurts!”

“I did not,” you grumble, voice quiet and gravelly, your mouth sticky. You throw your arm over your eyes and lament the existence of every other human being on Earth. “You stuck it under there. It was like...so cold,” you murmur, lulling back into dreamspace. “like a dog’s nose….”

“No, wake up!”

This time you wake up for good because he punches you right in the sternum. Then he holds his fist and whines about how much it hurts, and you push him out of the bed and onto the floor with a gangly thud. You say that the thud was gangly because you swear both knees and elbows hit the ground and made loud, knees and elbows noise.

“Don’t you usually sleep until, like, three pm? How are you so lively right now?” you yawn, swinging your legs over the side of the bed while John gets up and brushes himself off.

“Well, sometimes I don’t get to sleep for days on end, so it’s not like I’m not used to being tired,” he says. “I just hate it, is all.”

“Mmm.” you agree. Yeah, it sucks pretty bad.

You get up in a daze and don’t really absorb many of the things that happen to you. At some point you're holding coffee, which you assume John made, because when you taste it, it’s woefully lacking in sugar, and you would never allow that to happen on your own. Unfortunately, you’re too sleepy to fix it or even complain, so you just nurse your sour coffee while John bustles around, pulling on a pair of pants and a shirt. He jams your keys into your pocket and pushes you out the door.

He actually does a really good job of keeping you awake on the drive the airport. It’s a long drive (nearly two hours) but it’s not bad once you’ve loaded him full of caffeine. Then you just let him go, and he talks forever. His mouth never stops moving. He’s so cartoonish and cute.

“You’re so cute,” you say, affectionately, while you're stopped at a light, lulled by the tick of your turn signal, rolling your head to the side to look at him.

And then you remember what you’re doing, and who you’re talking to, and you snap your eyes back to the road, heart pounding. Haha, boy are you glad to be wearing shades! You fingers flex nervously against the steering wheel.

“Thanks,” John says, like nothing weird happened just now. “You’re okay for a gross bearded hipster.”

“Oh, I’m the hipster? Says the guy with the tetris block tattoo.”

“You’ll never stop teasing me about it, will you?”

“Fucking unlikely,” you say. You pass another sign. “Shit, son, we’re here.”

“Already?’ John says, perking up in his seat.

“Don’t piss your booster seat, sugarbreeches, we still gotta wait for her to land. I think she’s at...fuck, what gate was she supposed to be at…” while you’re thinking about this, John grouses about how he is far too old for a booster seat, and how much you suck.

Walking through the airport always gives you nerves, but now it’s even worse. When you’re waiting for Rose at baggage claim, you cant stop playing with the hem of your shirt. You hate crowds and loud places and big buildings. But this time...theres the boyfriend stuff.

“Okay, John, you got this?” you whisper to him, as if Rose could pop out from under the bench you’re sitting on at any moment and accuse you of being a lying little scamp. Which you are.

John rolls his eyes. “A hundred times, yes! I’ll pull out all the stops,” he says, and then pauses, looking up from his phone. “Throw me a five and I’ll kiss you when she walks down here.”

“What do you need a five for?”

“I want a shot glass from this airport.”

You don’t ask why. You just give him the five.

“Dave, it’s gonna be fine. She’s your family, the worst you’re going to get is teased,” John assures when he sees you worrying at your lower lip. Fuck, you're supposed to be so cool and unreadable, stop being….uncool and completely readable.

“Yeah, I just hate getting teased.”

“Your ego is so fragile it’s almost funny,” John says.

“You sound like Rose,” you grumble.

“It’s okay,” John says, and pats your thigh with his hand, the tattoos on his wrist lacing up into the sleeve of his shirt. It’s a good hand, and you like how it fees on your leg. You put your own hand on top of it. You look at John, who’s leaned over to face you, only a few inches from your nose, your shades reflected in his big, square frame glasses.

His gaze flicks over your shoulder and his eyes widen almost imperceptibly.

"Don’t turn around,” he whispers. You don’t. “Rose is blonde, right?”

“Yeah.”

“About 6'0'?”

“Yeah.”

“Carrying a plastic bag full of stuffed animals?”

“Uh...maybe?”

“Time to make good on those five bucks,” he says. Before you’re ready, he grabs the sides of your face and crushes his lips against yours

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wHOA HOLY shit its rose !!!! my shitty goth kid
> 
> also !!! dirk in the next chapter, i think.


	4. because, i love him

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> rose fails wholeheartedly to psychoanalyze anyone because, as it turns out, dave is overreacting (shock stinger sound)

This is NOT how he kissed you before. It’s not polite. You almost jump out of your skin from the sudden intensity, but he’s an amazing kisser. Fuck, how is he an amazing kisser? John Egbert is a lot of things, but you didn’t think total casanova was one of them. You sigh happily without really meaning to and your hands travel to wind into his hair, his tongue in your mouth, his teeth on your lips, very, very briefly.

Then your glasses click awkwardly together and he pulls away, feigning being startled. 

“Oh my God, Dave!” he squeaks, pushing you. Well, he’s a decent actor, at least, all flushed and embarrassed looking. “You didn’t tell me she was right there!” Sly bastard.

You turn, and there’s Rose, in all her magnificent, disheveled glory. She’s drenched in black from head to toe, but very comfortably. She could suffer the loss of her pretension for airplane comfort, you guess, because she’s donned the squiddles hoodie you got her for christmas last year in lieu of her usual black dresses. She’s got one eyebrow raised. Her smirk looks weird when it’s not caked with black lipstick.

“You must be the...significant other, I presume?” she asks, very smugly, as if she just caught you jerking off.

Well, you aren't sure smugness would be her very first reaction, but it would certainly happen later.

“John,” you supply. “His name is John.”

“John, then,” she says, and sticks out her hand. John takes it politely, standing up. Jesus, he seems small compared to her. The two of them look like some kind of mismatched comedy duo.

“You’re Rose, right?” John says, awfully polite and awfully bashful for the person you know he is. “Gosh, sorry, I didn’t think you were right there!”

“It’s perfectly alright, John,” Rose replies gracefully, “I really don’t mind.”

“Yeah, she loves the yaoi,” you grumble. “Nice to see you, cousin.”

“What, no hug? Dave, please,” Rose says, all condescendingly, because she knows you won’t. You snort. You missed her. You can’t help the little smile and wiggles its way across your face, which is totally not still flushed and hot.

“Yeah, yeah. Save the mush for when you and Dirk can start talking feelings. What’s the bag of stuffed crap for?”

“Oh,” she says, looking down as if she’s just remembered it. “Dirk said he needed them for some puppet business. I assume it has to do with their squirming, tentacle-esque appendages, which would be ideal for, and I do quote your dear brother on this, ‘a prostate massage.””

John shoots you the single most giddy look you’ve ever seen on his stupid face. He’s eating this up. He loves it. You want to push him onto the conveyor belt with the rest of the luggage.

“Prostate massage?” he echoes, almost jovially. Then he looks at Rose, giving her a conspiratorial stare. “Dave never gives me a prostate massage,” he whispers.

"Oh my God, John, shut up,” you hiss, pulling the neck of his shirt up over the back of his head while he guffaws at you.

Rose is chuckling, though. Everything is going...pretty well. She seems to have bought the faux boyfriend act hook, line, and sinker. Somehow the idea of outfoxing Rose is any way makes you feel like you’ve just displaced some vital part of the universe, and karma is going to kick your ass.

You’re pretty tired, so you aren’t up for the level of conversational excitement that Rose and John keep up on the way back, but it’s nice to hear them getting along well. She hasn’t started grilling him yet, and they seem to like each other. Rose smiles when John makes some silly comment about her outfit.

As you’re dragging her luggage into your apartment, she and John are still yammering on about some nonsense that you're barely paying attention to.

“You’re a writer, right? Dave said you were good!” John says. Well, that’s not exactly what you said. You said she wrote gay wizard smut.

“Certainly,” she replies, sitting on your couch. “I’m young, but Im very successful for my age. Artistry runs in our family,” she says. “What do you do, John?”

John shrugs. “A little of this, a little of that. I make video games, mostly!”

"Oh, I see,” she says, smiling, and you watch them carefully from the corner of your eye as you stack her things in a corner. Less room for your dirty laundry. “How is your relationship with Dave?” she asks, very suddenly, and you almost choke.

John, however, just blinks. "Good!” He says. “I mean, we haven’t been together for a super long time, but,” he says, and then pretends to think about it. “Yeah, it’s pretty great!” he chirps, and then he looks at you, straight at you, right in the eyes. He smiles softly, affectionately, like he’s known you his whole life, and your heart just about stops.

"Because…” he pauses. “I love him.”

Your mouth must be hanging open, because John giggles and Rose turns to look at you.

“Yeah, I know, gag, you hate feelings,” John says, waving a hand at you rather casually and rolling his eyes, as if he didn’t just drop a feelings bomb right on your heart. The blast radius spanned your entire conscious being. You are at ground zero for feelings.

“I’m very happy to hear that," Rose replies.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> whoa, this chapter seem a bit short? damn thing wont format properly, i cant get the rest to work. sorry bout it.
> 
> somebody asked what daves beard looks like. and i realized that i dont think i ACTUALLY mention what dave looks like outside of brief references to his eye color and weight. so far all we know about him is that he's probably tall, slightly chubby, and has red eyes (and we already all know the last thing) ill try to work a description in at some point so he can stop being so faceless compared to john
> 
> also i promise dirk next time. cross my heart hell be there


	5. mission imbrossible

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> dirk is a creep and dave has a WORLD SHATTERING and completely unsurprising revelation.
> 
> this picks up literally during a conversation from the previous chapter bc it was supposed to be all in one oops !!

“I’m sure Dirk will be too. He and I have been concerned for Dave’s wellbeing, since he’s living on his own, now, and all,” she says, sighing.

“I’m not five,” you say.

“Dave, please, your capacity for maturity is as sporadic as it is mind-bendingly shitty,” she says. “Either way, we can't leave you to your own devices for long.”

John laughs. “Oh, you’re telling me. He can be such a cold fish!”

“John…” you warn.

“The first time we kissed he just went stock still,” John says, imitating you as if you had suddenly become the Lincoln memorial, “and didn’t move for, like, an entire thirty seconds. It was so awful!”

Rose gives you a look. “Is that so? Dave has always been bad with the physical aspect of some intimate relationships.” Did she just imply that you're a shitty lay? Because you'll have her know, you are at the very least mediocre. You want credit for being mediocre at sex.

Then she pauses, and looks back at you. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard from Dirk yet?”

“No,” you say, “He’s as much of a fleece coated horsecock enigma as ever. Didn’t even text me.”

“I think he wanted us to have dinner somewhere together, but it’s not as though he’s been in here in a while. I don’t think he knows his way around as well as he used to,” Rose muses.

“I could cook something,” John says, piping up very suddenly and very eagerly.

You shoot him a derisive glance. “Uh, I remember you only ever cooking once, and it resulted in a milky, glue like foam over a pile of noodles. No.”

John snorts and rolls his eyes rather dramatically, crossing his arms over his chest. “I can cook just fine, it's not my fault your microwave is weird! It’s sort of a family thing,” he says, giving you a look.

Oh, right, shit. He’s the baking guy. You still don’t know if this is a good idea or not, but you haven’t had a proper home cooked meal in...several years, (or possibly ever, it's not as though Bro ever towed the line in that department) so it couldn’t hurt to let him try. If he fails, you could always just drag Rose to a pizza place or something.

“I think you’d need ingredients,” Rose says. “If I recall the state of this apartment the last time I visited, you won’t find them here.”

“I’ll just go out and get some stuff,” John says, shrugging. “I mean, I can’t make anything fancy, but I’m a good cook!”

“It’s nice to know that Dave won’t get scurvy,” Rose says. “Do you have money? I can help you pay.”

“No, I’ve got it,” you grumble, fishing through your wallet. “Here, if we combine forces, you can get something decent,” you say, and hand John a twenty.

"I can make a meal on less than this,” he says, like you’re issuing him a challenge, but you'd like it to be a nice meal and don't have time for pissing contests with him. You really just want some good food. "Okay, I’ll take my bike and go to the grocery,” he finally agrees.

“Can you carry all of that?” Rose asks, brows furrowed. “On your bike, I mean.”

“Sure!” John says, pocketing the twenty and getting up from his seat. “I used to be a bicycle courier, this kind of thing is no problem.”

John leaves, and you’re left alone with Rose. There’s the typical barbs that two of you exchange, and eventually you end up just sitting on the couch with her, laptops respectively open, saying nothing and enjoying one another’s presence. No need to put up a friendly front for family.

TT: Hey, Dave.

“Oh, shit, it’s Dirk,” you say, elbowing Rose, who looks over to see your screen.

“So it is,” she murmurs, looking nonplussed. You guess she's used to him skipping out on shit and then making contact at random.

TT: I may or may not have met a mutual friend of ours.  
TG: what kind of mutual friends would we have  
TG: what kind of bizarre crossover fanfiction bullshit would those people be  
TT: Rose.

You can FEEL Rose narrowing her eyes.

Just as you're replying to him, you get another notification.

EB: dave i think someone is following me around the supermarket!

“Dirk is going to scare off my boyfriend with a big rubber puppet dick or something. I can tell that's what's about to happen,” You grouse. Rose chuckles.

“Well, seeing as you managed not to send John screaming for the hills, I’m sure Dirk can’t do much worse. He’ll probably just intimidate him a little, you know how he gets.”

"What, unsettling and inappropriate? Yeah.”

TG: dont panic i think its just my brother  
EB: oh!  
EB: i mean i cant get a good look. every time i turn around he disappears like a dragon ball z character! i cant trace his afterimage technique!!!!!!  
TG: john that isnt how the afterimage technique works you literally would be able to see his afterimage thats the point of the technique thats why its called the afterimage technique john you are doing goku a disservice by misrepresenting his abilities  
EB: shut up about goku for one second jeez! but i guess that is good? thats hes here i mean.  
EB: dirk, not goku.  
EB: at least he made it into town safely!

TT: Why’d you warn him?  
TT: Now he’s waving in random directions when he thinks he sees me.  
TG: how do you even know who john is  
TG: honestly i should have expected this  
TG: cant drop down from the ceiling on me every year i mean subjecting your brother to cardiovascular arrest gets stale after a while  
TG: gotta step up your game and stalk my boyfriend around meijer  
TT: Oh, calm down. Rose texted me a picture she took of you two making out at baggage claim in the airport and I couldn’t resist doing some digging.  
TT: The facial recognition software in my shades is really remarkable. I only got about a fourth of the dude’s face and still managed to track him down.  
TG: you are terrifying  
TT: Terrifyingly informed and helpful, bro.  
TT: I’m just watching out for you, doing little background checks and keeping you safe.  
TT: I didn’t realize you had landed yourself a sugar daddy.  
TG: what

“What?” Rose asks, looking at you.

"Oh, uh,” you fumble, realization striking you. “Oh, balls. John asked me not to tell you guys. Dirk is such a nosy pile of flaccid puppet phallus, I swear…”

"Nosy isn't something that one wants a pile of flaccid puppet phallus to be, generally speaking," Rose says, quite astutely, "but somehow, it's what they always are." She nods sagely to herself.

TT: The heir to Crocker Corp.  
TT: Probably the nerdiest millionaire to ever live. Also, he made some shitty indie games that I've played. I'll have to get him to sign an autograph for me, and I'll place it right next to the one from Jon Bon Jovi.  
TG: john isnt my sugar daddy and id appreciate it if youd refrain from flaunting your creepy knowledge of him around to scare him  
TG: that was private information  
TT: Oh, lighten up. He has to get to know the family of the groom.  
TT: Besides, he seems cool with it. He’s waving at me right now.  
TT: Little bastard caught me when I wasn’t looking.  
TT: Anyway, I do believe it’s time for me to make my fantastic debut.  
TT: I’ll let you know how it goes.  
TG: dirk god damn it

“Ugh,” you groan, putting your face in your hands.

“Well,” Rose says, “that really is something. He’s keeping his identity a secret?”

"Yeah, he...Yeah. I’m not sure if he’d want me blabbing about it to you, and I’d hate to air out a dude’s dirty laundry...but yes.”

“That’s interesting,” she says, eyebrows high on her face. “He doesn’t seem the business type.”

“He’s not," you reply. “He’s more like...tragic nerd. Like it'd be sad if he didn't turn out to be such a piece of shit.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah, he’s...God, rose, his tattoos are so dumb! Have you seen them? And his glasses and his fucking voice. He looks and sounds like a loony toon,” you ramble. “And he seriously loves all the worst crap. He’s really good at his job, too, but he usually only applies his skills to horrible indie projects, so it’s like, why did you go to college? He’s obviously really smart, just a huge douche,” you say. “Plus, he’s-Rose, don't stare, it's weird.”

“It's nothing,” she says, sighing and closing her laptop. “It’s just been a while since I’ve seen you this invested in someone.”

Invested? You aren’t sure that you’d call what you just said invested. You think about John for a moment, and feel-yeah, okay, maybe you're knee deep in this friendship crap now. He’s your bro, after all. Of course you care about him. Of course you know his interests and find things about him charming. Of course, when he kissed you, you wished you were somewhere private-

Nope! Nope, fuck, wow, haha! No! Jesus. No. You don’t want to make out with that geeky cartoon character of a human being. That’s not your bag. You’re a cool artist who’s popular on the internet. You don’t do this.

“Dave, you’re red in the face,” Rose says, rather smugly.

“Because your intense desire for your brother to fall in yaoi is embarrassing and disturbing.”

“I haven’t seen very much yaoi so far, outside of when I first say the two of you," Rose says. "The yaoi safari has been a bit of a bust."

“I know you’re gay, so it’s not like you even get off on it, which might make it worse.”

“I just like the idea,” Rose says. “After all those years you spent avidly defending your heterosexuality, here you are, waxing poetic about some other man's terrible video games.”

“Fucking gross, Rose. Don’t talk to me about his video games like that, you'll get me all hot and bothered. I've got a half chub just thinking about it.”

She chuckles. “Alright, Dave. So are you ready for Christmas?”

“Ugh,” you groan. “Yeah, I guess. I got you a gift, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“That was what I was asking.”

“Oh, fuck off, Rose. I might not have put up a tree, but we are full on in holiday mode right now. Ready to launch the holiday torpedoes.”

After that, you spend some time toodling around the apartment and hiding all the sharp objects in preparation for Dirk’s inevitable arrival. You get worried when an hour passes and John hasn't come back, suspecting that Dirk has subjected him to some vaguely pornographic threats an sent him running. But after a while, the doorbell does ring.

“Rose, can you get that?” you shout, putting away the last of the dishes.

“Of course, dear brother, I live to serve your every fleeting whim,” she singsongs sarcastically back at you, as if getting the door is the most taxing chore she's ever been forced to do. You hear the door open. “Oh, Dirk!”

“Sup,” you hear your brother's intensely Texan voice drawl at her.

“Hi, Rose!” John chirps.

You hear them all come in; feet stomping about, grocery bags hitting the floor, John laughing too loudly.

“Dave, you didn’t tell me how funny your brother is!” John says, sticking his head into the doorway that separates the kitchen from the sitting room.

“Yeah, he’s a riot. Almost gave you a heart attack,” you say, taking the bag of groceries he hands to you when he walks into the room. You immediately place it on the table and begin to pilfer it.

“What is all this stuff?’ You ask.

“Oh, you know, coconut milk, curry power, various spices, long grain rice. I also got a chicken and some,” he pauses, pushing some of the cans of coconut milk into he cabinet, “asparagus.”

“Gross,” you whine. “That shit makes your piss stink.”

John rolls his eyes.

Dirk finally walks in, and you nod toward each other in a very practiced Strider fashion. He’s shorter and much heavier set than you, but he has a sharpness about him that you lack. He always gives the impression that he’s up to something, even when he’s not.

“Dirk, can you get me the stuff from the living room?" John asks.

“Sure thing, hot stuff,” he says, with a two fingered salute, and then walks out of the room. John flushes.

“You better not get a crush on him,” you warn.

“I’m not, jeez!” John says. He walks up next to you and puts his arm around your waist. "Just you,” he says, kissing your shoulder through your shirt.

For an instant, you forget he’s pretending. For an instant, it feels real, and you shiver, suddenly very warm in the middle, overflowing with a desire to put your arm around him and hold him there. You remember very acutely what his hands felt like, what his kiss felt like. Your can’t push the memory away, can’t stop your lips from recalling the sensation, even if it's just an instant of firing synapses and phantom feeling.

Then Rose walks in, and you remember that he IS pretending.

You still let your hand slip down his back and grab his ass through his basketball shorts, though. How the hell is wearing those out in this weather? The fistfull you get is alarmingly nice, though. He stiffens visibly, and Rose quirks an eyebrow as you knead his butt.

Then he pinches your side really hard and you yelp, jumping away.

"Jeez, no need to get violent!” you whine.

“You put your hand on my-!" he starts, looking only about 50% playful. The other 50% is how much you can see him restraining himself from trying to wrestle you to the ground and noogie your fucking head off. You don't want him to do that, because his knuckles are incredibly sharp. He looks at Rose, and then at the ground, clearing his throat. “Uh, sorry.”

"Don’t be,” Rose says, looking INTENSELY amused. Dirk walks back in, tossing the groceries onto the table.

“What’d I miss?” he rumbles.

“Dave tried to cop a feel and John pinched him,” Rose says.

“Cool,” Dirk says. “So, are we gonna get this show on the proverbial road or what?”

“It’s a little early,” John says. “We could have lunch, though. I could probably start the chicken soon.”

Dirk just raids your fucking panty. Politely, of course, with a curtsy and a grumbled request for permission, because he’s that kind of asshole. Pretty much as soon as you give the word, Dirk cracks open a can of pringles and leaves the room. Rose wants to skype her girlfriend to tell her she made it to your place safe and sound, and John decides that, since the group is dispersing, it’s time for a shower.

“I wanna facetime my Dad later, I have to look presentable,” he says.

After he’s gone, you put the groceries away and lament the cleanliness of your apartment. It’s very well kept at the moment, if for not other reason than because John is here and it’s so crowded right now. You’re usually alone, so it’s weird for so many people to be in your tiny living space. It feels really cramped, but you’re glad they’re here. You’d never admit it, but you missed Dirk and Rose, like...so fucking much You missed them so fucking much, and it’s so nice to see them sitting on the couch together, chatting quietly and loquaciously like they do. If you didn’t know better, you’d say Rose was Dirk’s twin, not you.

“Ah, crap,” You mutter. You need to put toilet paper in the bathroom again, you think. You'e pretty sure it's empty right now. You grab some from a bin by the counter and traipse back to the restroom, knocking on the door.

“What?" Johns voice blares over the sound of the shower.

“I need to replace the paper,” you reply.

“No way, dude!” he says. “No bueno!”

“Too bad, I’m coming in!” you reply. You hear him making loud disappointed noises when you push to door open.

It’s all warm and humid in the bathroom, and the mirror has fogged up already. You clear part of it with your hand, drawing a tiny penis in the corner of the mirror for John. Jesus, has your hair looked this much like shit all day today? It's just a big pile of curly fluff. The lines under your eyes are deep, and you think you can see the beginning of a zit marring your otherwise freckled-to-perfection brown skin. You'd try to pop it but John is in here and you're pretty sure it'd be weird to do that with him, like...three feet away. You slip the roll of toilet paper onto the little holder embedded in the wall. John pokes his head out of the shower.

“You couldn’t wait ten minutes, could you?” he grouses, his wet hair sticking to his face. You shrug.

“Might as well do it now. ‘sides, wouldn’t want you stuck in here with none, Eggs. You should be thanking me.

“Yeah, thanks for the butthole cleansing wipes. Now scram, alright? Two’s a crowd!” he says. Then he pauses. “Oh, wait. Do you have conditioner?”

“Uh…” you mutter. Fuck, do you? You think you have a bottle under the sink. You bend down and start looking.

Man, it’s weird. Only recently, he’d push you out of the bathroom if he was just brushing his teeth or something. What happened to courtesy between the two of you?

“Here,” you say, rummaging about and retrieving it, before holding it out to him.

“Thanks,” he replies, and leans out, his arm emerging form the shower and grabbing the bottle.

Something about him strikes you just then. He’s a single, adult male, and he looks good, and you like him.

It’s just...just then, you realize it. Just the hint of his naked shoulder, the slickness of his skin, the way his tattoos are something your’e reluctantly really into...all of it culminates in an instant of intense attraction to him. To John Egbert. To this guy, who has been practically living in your apartment, who you never thought much about, and who’s dating services you are currently paying for.

His fingers touch yours. They’re hot. His skin is flushed from the heat of the water, and for once nothing about him strikes you as awkward or funny or silly. He goes, in an instant, from Bugs Bunny to Jessica Rabbit. Your heart rate seems to double, and your whole body heats as he draws away. 

“I have to go,” you suddenly blurt, turning around and leaving the bathroom, and slamming the door behind you.

You make an immediate beeline for your bedroom. Once inside, you close and lock the door behind you. You pace around. You push your fingers into your spongey hair. You try to take apart and process these feelings you have apparently been developing. Fuck. This is bad. This is so, so bad.

You like John Egbert.

Fuck, you like him so much. God dammit. Of course you do.

What do you do now? Jerk off? Cry? Both, at the same time, while listening to Bob Dylan? You flop down onto your bed and wail into your pillow. This is the worst possible outcome for this situation. You could not have fucked this up worse than you currently have. This is some romcom shit. You are still coming to terms with the fact that his naked body even EXISTS. 

Your whole body is warm. You roll over and rub your arms, staring up at the ceiling, running over every interaction you had with him that could have lead to this point, trying to find the one that ruined everything. You can’t though, and in stead you just get a thousand unwanted memories of him touching you, talking to you, and smiling that crooked, dopey sneer of his. Every memory you have of him is suddenly tainted by your bromosexual intentions. Suddenly, when you think of that time he flopped down into your lap when you were practicing cuddling, the next thing that your mind springs on you like a terrifying clown out of a music box is an image of him curled around you, kissing your face.

You are assaulting yourself with tiny clips of fantasies you don’t even want to have. He’s your fake boyfriend, not your real boyfriend. You can’t think about him like this, or it’ll get weird. Then he won’t want to ever talk to you again.

When you stumble out of your room and into the living room, Dirk comments on your stressed appearance.

“Dude, what happened? Did you walk in on John taking a shit or something?” he asks.

“No,” you croak, completely honestly, because you can’t even cook up a more outrageous, predictable lie than the actual truth. It is nothing if not outrageous and entirely obvious that this would happen. Of course this would happen, you’ve basically been pretend flirting with him for several days straight, complete with faux kisses and plenty of cuddling. You’re just responding the way any person would.

It doesn’t help that John is...John. Not your usual type, but...you already care about him a lot, and it’s not like having a crush on a friend you care about is far fetched in any way.

Time to wallow in your regrets.

When John gets out of the shower, he’s all damp and he smells really nice and now you notice things about him like a raw nerve. Now it’s like...pathetic, but also...nice. Now, when he talks to you or looks at you, you are reminded of what an absolute buttfuck dingbat you are.

He makes dinner. It's almost fabulous enough to take your mind off of your tragic awakening. He makes some kind of curry and basmati rice. Dirk doesn’t stop singing his praises for a very, very long time. It's really spicy, though, so you have to eat it slowly.

John then spends some time talking to his Dad. You're pretty much lost in your own miserable, shell shocked little world, so you notice very little of it. He turns his phone so the man on the screen-his Dad, you assume-can look upon you doing the dishes and Rose sitting at the table with Dirk. John is smiling really big the whole time and you can hear his Dad yelling like it'll help John hear him better. You also overhear a bit of a conversation about John's Dad sending him more porcelain clowns. When you ask John what was up with it, he says, "he doesn't know I don't like them, and if you tell him I'll break your legs like you'll break his heart." It's almost catastrophically endearing. 

Things with him were going so well! You were going to get out of holiday ridicule for being single and hang out with a chill dude in the process. Now everything is the opposite of chill. Now when you share a bed with him and his cold little foot touches your leg, you can’t stop thinking about how nice it is, about how much better it would feel if he were actually your boyfriend and his foot touched your leg. God, you're the worst human being alive.

You love his awful voice and his weird face and his horrible fucking jokes.

Fuck. This crush is powerful.

You’re a grown ass man, you shouldn't even be getting crushes. Maybe you’re just lonely. Maybe it’s been too long since the last time you get laid or even looked at a person who wasn’t family. Maybe you just want intimacy.

Maybe you want it from John specifically.

Eventually, you fall asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> man that dave description is shoehorned in as obviously as fuckin possible, but there u go. im not rly gonna get super intense w physical descriptions of any of these characters tho bc like. idk. it isnt rly necessary. outside of shamelessly flaunting some of my fave hcs there isnt much of a point since everyone knows what they look like already
> 
> also, apologies if this chapter is sort of everywhere in terms of. being edited poorly. i mean im usually casual as fuck abt that shit (as im sure its obvious. spelling errors and grammatical fuckups everywhere.) but im very tired and i dont rly have time to spend on this so. yknow. quality decrease: imminent.
> 
> it also might be a while before the next chapter just bc of school. probably not more than like. a week, though.


	6. firetrucks dont stop at red lights

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> NSFW content ahead
> 
> christmas happens

When John wakes you up, it’s because he’s pretending to smother you with a pillow. When you swat him away with a vague, mumbled death threat, he makes a theatric performance of being afraid.

You are afforded a few blissful minutes wherein you forget about the epiphany of yesterday, before you crack open your eyes and see him. Then it all comes crashing back down.

He adjusts his glasses, still wearing his “jammies." He’s just sitting in your bed playing with his phone, feet under the sheets, propped up against the headboard.

“Who are you texting?” you ask.

“Oh,” he says. “Sol. He wants to know where I am.”

“He your dad or some shit? None of his business.” you grumble.

“Nah, we’re working on a project together, and I’m usually in his stanky lab all the time. He’s the only one of us who has the computer power to do what we need to do. I mean, my desktop is nice, but it’ll crash if you-”

He starts talking about Zbrush and you stop listening. This is nice. This feels really nice, just lying in bed next to him. He shows no signs of wanting to get out, and neither do you. The bed is comfortable and warm and has a new smell to it. Not bad, just different, because it’s not just yours any more. You close your eyes and listen to John talk and the tiny sounds of his fingers hitting the screen of his phone.

You reach over and pull his leg toward you so that it’s at your side. He snorts. “Lonely? That’ll be another fifty if you wanna cuddle off the clock.”

“I’m your friend,” you whine. He sighs.

"Okay,” he grunts, slipping back into bed and rolling so that he’s sort of snuggling the side of your body. “Happy now?”

“No, you’re really bony.”

“Beggars can’t be choosers,” he says. His voice is extra raspy in the morning, but quieter than usual.

He lies there for a bit, and you drift in and out of sleep. Maybe Dirk and Rose will sleep in. They were up pretty late last night, drinking and arguing like kids.

“We should pretend to fuck,” John whispers suddenly. You crack your eyes open and look at him, daydreams interrupted.

“What?”

“C’mon, help me-” he says, and cuts himself off by squirming away from you. He bounces on the bed a little, and then puts his hands on the headboard, bumping it against the wall apprehensively.

“John, what are yo doing?” you inquire, propped up on your elbow, smiling without meaning to. He’s up to some shit again. He’s always up to some shit.

“Oh, Dave,” he sighs, rather loudly, and leans against the headboard, making it squeal. He looks at you expectantly, shit eating grin plastered all over his face.

Torturing Rose and Dirk? Sounds like a fair trade, since they’re the reason you’re in this predicament at all.

Well, you did this to yourself, actually, but it’s easier to blame them.

“John,” you moan, barely biting back the laughter.

“Ah!” he yelps. “P-please…”

“Do you like this?” you say, pushing your voice low and husky.

John looks like he’s about to shit himself. His eyes are watering and he’s holding back the laughter only just, but to his credit, it does not affect his superb voice acting. What does affect it is when you tell him to call you "daddy." He almost breaks into a laugh.

“Fuck!” he says, really loud, “Oh, yeah, that’s it, fuck me!” he slams his upper body against the headboard with a loud thump.

His stupid voice saying shit like this is putting you in stitches. It's like listening to Daffy Duck recite lines from Fifty Shades. You bite your hand and try not to let the laughter ruin the illusion. You hear shifting from the living room. Thank god for these paper thin walls.

“Oh, god!”

He's pushing against he headboard rhythmically, pretending to smother his own voice. He completes the act with heavy breathing, his raspy little voice cracking when he gets too loud. The moaning and whining escalates until it’s fast and loud, rhythmic with imaginary thrusts.

“Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck-!”

And then Dirk busts through the door with what seems to be a DVD sharpened and fashioned into the shape of a throwing star.

John screeches. You finally let out the laugh that has been threatening to puncture your lungs for ten minutes. You double over on the bed, hiding your face.

Dirk looks so fucking pissed.

“You woke me up-” he points his finger at John, “at nine in the morning-” he brandishes the DVD at you, "for this softcore puppet show shit?!". John scrambles away, but is guffawing like an idiot.

Rose is standing in the doorway, looking a bit miffed.

“Dirk, I can’t believe you busted in here,” you say. “What if we were actually fucking?”

“Oh my God, you two sounded cornier than a porn parody of Friends. The illusion lasted for about two minutes,” he says, giving you a disappointed stare. “Honestly. Porn actors get paid to embellish the truth, remember?”

You want to say that John does too, but you hold you tongue.

“Aw,” John whines. “I need to get better, then.”

“You’re both children, and you suck,” Rose says.

“C’mere, honeybunch,” you coo at John, who makes kissy noises at you.

“No, don’t," Dirk whines. “Don’t do that. This isn’t how I wanted to start today. You’re both idiots.”

John makes wet smacking noises with his mouth.

“I’m out,” Rose says, turning on her heel and exiting the room.

Breakfast means Rose leaving to get decent coffee and Dirk going back to bed, so it's pleasantly quiet after how loud things got last night. You sit at the kitchen table with your laptop open and John sits next to you, eating a strawberry poptart with both of his feet in your lap.

“Hey, John?”

“Yeah?”

“You’re doing a good job,” you say, ambiguously, afraid Dirk might here you. "Uh, thanks, I guess.”

He pauses, and looks at you, hair messy and eyes squinting slightly in the light of the kitchen. “Oh, no problem,” he says. “It’s not like it’s hard. I mean, we’re friends, it’s not like I’m super grossed out or anything,” he whispers to you. You snort.

“Thanks for not finding me repulsive.”

“You’re welcome.”

You want to say other stuff. He’s getting paid, but he seems to be going the extra mile. He gets along with your weird family and with you. That’s more than you’d ask of pretty much anyone else.

You put your hand on his shin and rub your thumb over the juncture of his ankle. You feel him wiggle his toes, but he doesn’t move.

“Wanna play firetruck?" you ask.

“What’s that?” he asks.

“Oh, c’mon, didn’t you go the high school?’

He just frowns.

“Its a game where….okay, just say ‘red light’ when you want me to stop, okay?” you reply. He nods and takes a sip of the glass of water he has sitting on the table.

Your hand slides up his leg to his knee.

"Oh, I see what this is,” he says. “I see what kind of tom foolery and japery is being pulled here on me, sir,” he continues, wagging his finger, but not saying red light.

“Didn’t say red light,” you reply, and slip your hand further up his leg until the tips of your fingers are on the inside of his skinny thigh, touching him through the material of his pajamas. You are a filthy, awful person for doing this. He looks down at it, and then back up at you, brows furrowed, looking to be a fairly even mix of stubborn and bemused. You swallow, and scoot closer so you can reach him more easily.

You move your hand up further. His skin is hotter close to his groin, which is normal you guess, but it makes your heart jump like you’re in middle school again. Your fingers are dangerously close to his bologna pony. His eyes flick down to your hand, back up, back down, back up. You expect him to back down, but he doesn’t, he just makes a face that looks like he’s concentrating.

Suddenly his legs come off of your lap, but as soon as you think it is an admittance of defeat and you are free form this game of almost giving yourself a coronary, you realize that it’s not. He just parts is legs really far apart so he’s almost straddling the chair and leans back, squinting at you and looking incredibly smug, your hand not an inch from his no-no square.

“Go ahead,” he hisses. “I dare you.”

“Uh,” you stutter, pretty uselessly, your eyes moving back to look at what your hand is doing. You slip it very slightly closer, not wanting to feel like too much of a baby, before your index finger brushes his package, and nope-

“R-red light, red light...” you mutter, jerking away suddenly.

“Hah!” he shouts, both fists shooting into the air. “I win the firetruck game!”

“You can’t win it, dumbass. The point is that firetrucks don’t stop for red lights. Even if you had said red light I probably would have...I don’t know, punched your wiener or something.”

“That would be assault, Dave, which is illegal,” he says, incredibly smug. “Also, I totally won it. I am the winner, the winner is me.”

“Whatever,” you say, exactly as you would have in middle school.

A stretch of silence occurs between the two of you.

Then he leans in. “Hey, Dave?”

“What?”

“Do you mind if I try something?”

“If you give me a wet willie again, I swear to god-”

“Yes or no.”

“...Sure.”

You feel his hand on your thigh. “Let's play the firetruck game.”

“John, we just did this.”

His hand slides confidently up your leg. You realize instantly that he isn’t stopping incrementally, he’s going straight for the gold like the ambitious piece of shit that he is. His dick ambition is so strong. Your breath hitches when you feel his hand reach the corner formed by your leg and hip, and then his fingers dip tentatively downward. He pauses.

“You wanna say firetruck, dude?” he asks, rather quietly, wide eyed and waiting. You wonder whether or not he's been letting you test the waters on purpose.

You shake your head, incapable of speech or coherent thought.

You realize too late that you’re sporting a half chub already from the first game with him, and now theres no passing that off as some platonic brodude gay chicken. 

Then his hand slips all the way down, warm and gentle, and cups you though your boxers. An involuntary noise escapes you, humiliatingly high pitched, and he gives you a gentle, experimental squeeze.

“What are you doing?’ you ask.

This came out of nowhere, and honestly, you're getting some serious emotional whiplash right now.

He shrugs. “I dunno,” he replies, simply and easily, even as he massages you through the thin material of your underwear in the kitchen while your brother sleeps in the next room. “twenty bucks and I’ll get you off,” he whispers, close to your ear, and his voice isn’t funny when he’s saying shit like that, it just makes tingles rush over your skin.

“Deal, man. Deal,” you rasp back at him, body already responding. God, you're so sensitive. It’s been a long time since any hands but your own have touched you. You didn’t even realize it, but you’re responding to this like a teenager. It’s kind of embarrassing, but there are more pressing things on your reeling mind at the moment.

He pulls your dick out of the hole in your boxers, and you sigh, legs parting a bit, shaking slightly. “Yeah,” you murmur. “Like that.”

He withdraws his hand to spit in it, and then puts it back. It feels almost chilled next to the heat of your cock, but as soon as he starts jerking you off, you don’t really care any more. You moan and lean back in your chair, laptop screen turning off, you breath coming out in happy little sighs.

“Fuck, man,” you whine, unsure of what to do with your hands. You settle for gripping the seat of your chair, legs parting wide, hips pushing up into his hand.

You crack your eyes open to look at him. He’s staring down at you, but looks otherwise nonplussed, your dick emerging form his fist sporadically. Suddenly his glasses and his hair and his stupid tattoos are the hottest shit ever and you can’t stop thinking about how sexy he is.

Then he leans down, and angels descend from heaven in a rising crescendo choir because he swallows you down almost immediately. You squeak helplessly when his lips hit the tip of your dick and part, covering his teeth, as he slides down your length. He makes easy work of it; way too easy for this to be anywhere near his first time doing this.

His mouth is hot and wet and his tongue is working you damn good. This is probably among the best blowjobs you have ever received in your life, and it’s happening like THIS. What a joke.

You hand fists in his hair without your explicit consent, and your teeth grit. He lets you push up into his mouth, hips jerking uncontrollably as you breath comes in heavy pants, whines following them. The chair squeaks against the kitchen floor, and you hear and feel John groan. You see him palm himself through his pajamas and you just-you lose it.

You bite your fist to keep the sound from bubbling out, and push him down on your dick. You probably will owe him for this later. Orgasm crashes over your body in waves, pulsating through your nervous system, ricocheting up and down your entire body until all you are is a shivering pile of warm, tingly sensitivity. You hear him swallow around you, the heavy gulp, and you shiver, your grip on his hair releasing.

You’re still breathing hard when he sits up, a line of spit connecting his mouth to your cock. He breaks it, lips wet and red, and swallows again. He licks his teeth, and looks at you.

“Twenty bucks,” he says.

“No cuddling?” you reply, voice coming out shakier than you would’ve wanted.

He smiles.

It takes everything in your physical being for you not to climb into his lap and beg him to date you. Fortunately, you have been thoroughly schooled in the ways of cool, so you don’t do that. In stead you just nod your head and tuck your dick back into your underwear like a proper cooldude gentleman does post-beej.

You’re halfway between throwing up and kissing him when Dirk walks into the room, effectively destroying your afterglow experience. Both of you look up at him, frozen. John’s mouth is still wet, and you probably look like you’ve just run a small marathon. Dirk, on the other hand, is frowning very intensely at both of you, shades off. You get the full intensity of his intimidating orange stare..

“That time was real, wasn’t it?” he asks. It isn't really a question.

“Uh….” you reply, intelligently.

“You wanna tell me why you’re paying him for kitchen blowjobs?”

Oh, shit. Crap. Fuck. The jig is up.

“It’s a roleplay thing,” John says confidently, and you turn to stare at him, astonished that he managed to lie so quickly under the pressure that is Dirk Strider. “I pretend to extort him and give him orders,” he says, shrugging and shooting you a smirk. "He gets off on it.”

“Oh, GROSS,” Dirk says, looking visibly offended, which is a rare sight indeed. His entire face looks like he's just stepped in cat puke. “Oh, fuck, dude. Nasty.”

“Don’t kink shame me, puppet man,” you shoot back. Dirk has no room to judge. Even if what John is saying is a lie, he has no room. He fucks puppets. You've seen his desktop wallpaper, it's that weird buff man in a horse costume.

“That just-that TMI, you’re my fuckin' brother-”

“Oh, don’t start pretending to have boundaries now!” you say. “It’s a little too late for that.”

“Ugh, I’m just-Christmas is ruined, now. You ruined Christmas, Dave,” Dirk says. He looks at John, frowning. “John, I thought you had class.”

John then mimes a blowjob, opening his mouth and poking his tongue into his cheek, complete with a wet choking noise.

“Oh, fuck right off the edge of my dick,” Dirk says, and storms out of the room. “Just, fuck! Way to be horrible hosts!”

When Rose gets back, it’s to a room of awkward stares. She looks unsettled for a moment, and then produces a tiny fake Christmas tree from her bag, and the room lights up with whoops and cheers. Dirk does not speak of the blowjob incident again.

Unfortunately, neither does John, which is confusing to say the least. He went from 0 to 100 awfully fast, and now he seems happy to forget that anything even happened. You don’t press him or anything, not wanting to seem needy, but you wonder about it all day.

That's an understatement. You barely contain how much you agonize over it all day. 

“Christmas is tomorrow, fools, “ Dirk announces at about 9 pm, when everyone is sitting on the fold out couch in front of the tv. “Time for…”

“Ghost Dad!” John pipes up. Dirk points at him, smiling and looking like the host of a game show.

“No!” he shouts at top volume.

“I could go for a Charlie Brown christmas,” you say.

“Dave, we could just watch any given tv channel for that,” Rose says.

“All you suckers are going to lose, though, because I get to pick the movie this time,” Dirk says. He produces, seemingly form nowhere, an unlabeled DVD.

“Oh, oh,” Rose says, raising her hand.

“Yes, to the lady in the back,” Dirk replies, pointing in her direction.

“Is it homemade pornography?”

“You’re very lucky that it’s not,” he replies far too seriously.

John scoots over and sits on your lap and you wrap your arms around him, placing your chin on his shoulder. It happens very naturally. He whispers something about your beard being scratchy while Dirk puts the DVD in, and for the first time, you actually consider shaving it off for him.

“Alright homos, stop it,” Dirk says, sitting down next to the two of you, clearly still wounded. “No joy allowed. This is the anti-fun zone.”

You kiss John’s cheek to emphasize exactly how much you aren’t going to stop snuggling. Rose snorts at your show of general smugness.

The the movie starts and you all groan because it’s The Dark Crystal. Dirk has this shit eating grin on his face and you threaten to punch it off. he just swats you away like a fruit fly.

The whole time the godawful movie is playing, you’re holding your fake boyfriend’s hands. You rub your thumbs over his tattooed wrists, and you enjoy the weight of his body. You have to resist wantonly running your hands over it. You kiss between his shoulder blades and he squirms. Huh. You've gotten pretty comfortable with the whole...physical affection thing.

When the movie is over, Rose is asleep already, snoring slightly. Dirk curls up next to her. You kiss his forehead and he swats you away, grumbling about not needing goodnight kisses. John kisses his forehead too and narrowly avoids getting punched.

You and John walk back to bed, the tv off and the lights dim. When you get in bed he crawls in after you, having worn his pajamas all day. His hands move to your neck and he pulls you into a wet, open mouthed kiss that seems to go on forever, your legs twining with his under the sheets, his warm body a cure for the chill of winter.

“Merry Christmas Eve, Dave,” he says, finally, rolling off of you and turning out the bedside lamp. You tickle him and he giggles, pushing you away. You kiss his neck. It's good.

“Wanna spoon?” you ask.

“For a price,” he says.

“How much do you want?”

“A nickel,” he says. “Come here.”

And then you wrap your body around his. you feel his small back against your front and it fits like a puzzle piece. You apartment feels so full and so happy. You feel so full and so happy. You smell his hair, and it smells like your shampoo. You smile into it.

You go to sleep.

“Wake up! Wake up, Dave!”

You almost scream.

John is bouncing around on the bed like a child. You groan and pull your pillow over your head. He’s much less charming when he’s not making out with you.

“Get up! get up!” he shouts, and then leaps off of the bed, sprinting into the other room. You hear him yelling and Dirk and Rose screaming. You almost smile.

You pour a cup of coffee while John makes everyone sit in a circle. Dirk and Rose retrieve gifts hidden in their luggage, and you pull out their gifts from your closet. You got something for John, but it was from way before all of this was even decided, so...who knows if it’s even contextually appropriate any more. John just seems happy that Christmas has come, and won’t stop bouncing around the apartment like a child, not a 24 year old man.

Dirk is down to his skivvies, but nobody seems to mind. Rose has decided to wear something nice to sleep in, and John has somehow managed to find a pair of felt reindeer antlers to put on. He must’ve packed them, because you're certain that no such thing exists in your apartment.

“Once everyone has their gifts, I’ll make breakfast,” he says.

"Oh, there’s no need,” Rose says. “Surely I can pick up the slack this time, John. You’ve been working your adorable little butt off for us this entire time.”

“It’s not that adorable,” Dirk grumps.

“It’s pretty fucking adorable,” you say, and goose him. He yelps, and tries to pinch your nipple through your shirt before Rose pulls him away, the exasperated mother to your baby in a playpen who wont stop picking on other babies. You’re all sitting on the fold out couch in a crudely arranged circle. It’s crowded, but that’s okay.

“Okay, who’s going first?’ Rose asks.

John and Dirk's hands shoot up and they instantly trade cold stares.

“...Dirk.”

“Hell yes. Thanks, Rose. Doing good for the blood of the family,” he says, reaching over the side of the futon. “John, your gift isn’t tailored to you as we hadn’t yet met when I got it. Sorry.”

“It’s okay!” John says. “I’m just flattered you got me anything at all!”

Dirk also hands you a box, which you begin tearing into instantly.

“Jeez, Dave,” John says, but doesn’t follow up with anything.

You get the sickest and most expensive new pair of headphones. You squeal, and almost drop them, and then squeal because you almost dropped them. They are probably the nicest thing you own as of right now. Rose gets a bunch of books you don’t understand, but seems just as excited about them. John gets smuppet that has the words "your name here" lovingly embroidered onto it.

He throws it at Dirk, who dodges it. It lands on the floor behind the couch. John then gets up to retrieve it anyway, and Dirk shoots you a weird little smirk.

Next is Rose. You all get a bunch of knitted stuff, because unlike Dirk, she doesn't have money to sling around at the moment. You snuggle up in your scarf while dirk puts on his knitted crop top with Grover’s vague, unsettling likeness stitched onto it. John is wearing the mittens before you even see him open the gift.

You’re next. Dirk does not appreciate the furby you modified to his likeness as much as you would’ve hoped, but he does appreciate the shirt with a poorly screen printed buff rabbit man on it quite a lot. He wedges it on over the knitted grover crop top and looks like he’s stuffed with M&Ms, and has also put on quite a few pounds.

“Oh, Dave,” Rose says when she opens your gift, looking all misty eyed. “Thank you.”

It's moonshine.

You got John a bunch of nerd shit that he likes, which he still, quite predictably, really likes. (“Thanks, Dave! I’ve always wanted this stupid rabbit toy!”-John Egbert) He wallows around in his loot.

“Um, I’m sorry your gifts aren't very personalized, either!” John says as he hands Rose and Dirk their boxes. He hands you yours, too, and it’s the smallest of the three, which you gripe about. He just rolls his eyes and hits your stomach.

They both get a copy of some video game. You’ve heard of it, it came out pretty recently.

“I worked on this!” John says.

“Oh, shit. Cool,” Dirk says, turning it over in her hands. Rose doesn’t really do The Video Games, but she appreciates it anyway, asking questions about what he did and how he did it, which sets him off on various tangents.

Then you open yours.

You lift open the top of the small box to find a pair of shades.

“Stillers,” John fills in when you just stare at them. “He actually wore them! I figured that might at least score you some irony points or something, haha.”

You draw them up out of the box. They’re immaculate, and exactly your style. You'd honestly buy them for yourself, even. You pull your shades off, squinting in the light. Rise and Dirk watch you attentively as you put them on your face.

“Nice,” you say, more sincerely than you really meant to. “Thanks, John.”

“That’s not all that's in there, dummy,” he groans.

You look back down, and push more brightly colored packing paper out of the way. There’s a tiny card sitting in the bottom of the bag. You pick it up. It’s a gift card.

“300 bucks,” John says. You look at him.

300 bucks. You mouth opens and closes.

Dirk whistles. “That’s some cash,” he says, missing the significance completely. You stare at John, and he stares back, smiling slightly.

“Figured I’d give you a refund on that smurf,” he murmurs.

“What?” Rose says. Dirk shushes her.

“But I’m not done with the smurf,” you say, barely audible.

John just grins. “We’re friends, dumbass! I’m not gonna leave.”

“What? Rose repeats, only to get shushed again.

Friends.

“Honestly, I felt a little guilty,” he mutters, “Um..about you buying me that plane ticket, I mean, haha!” Yeah, nice save asshole. Not suspicious at all.

Rose is making a vaguely constipated face, and looks at Dirk, who just shrugs.

After that, Rose makes an entire ceremony of opening her bottle of moonshine, declaring that you all have to try it. It’s strawberry. You know she hates fruity flavored booze, so of course it’s exactly what you got her.

You refuse to puzzle over John’s sudden refund. You don’t want to get your hopes up. He just seems to be doing whatever suits him in the moment, and although looking back you can definitely see that as apart of his personality, you wish he were a little more transparent.

You reject the moonshine, but John accepts. He pours it into the shot glass he got at the airport, and he and Rose do a countdown while Dirk observes attentively from the other side of the kitchen table.

“One, two, three!” they chant, and then toss back the upsettingly clear alcohol in one go. 100 proof.

Rose smacks her lips, rolls her shoulders, and makes a pleased face, but otherwise does not react.

John, on the other hand, leans back in his chair and looks like he’s on a rollercoaster, seeming somehow both confused and deeply offended, making a loud “aaaaaAAAAAA" noise, followed by a gag. He bends over the edge of the table and coughs at the floor while Rose laughs into her hand.

“Oh my god,” he rasps, and you can’t stop laughing when you see his face, because it’s flushed and slobbery. His eyes are watering, and he looks like Rose just took his lunch money. “Why did you let me do that?”

“John, I thought you’d had this before, you rose to the challenge so confidently,” Rose says, “Why did you agree?”

“I thought it would be funny,” he says, before gagging again, and putting his hand up solemnly when Rose offers him another shot, behaving generally like he’s at a funeral for a loved one.

You are forced to remember that Dirk and Rose will be leaving tomorrow. Dirk has to go home asap to finish a project, and Rose can’t be away from her desk for long. You wonder how they could become adults so fast, how you could all grow up so quickly. One day, you’re banging on upturned pots and pans on the kitchen floor with Dirk while Rose sings a rendition of the Pokemon theme in the presence of her drunk mother, the next...Dirk is banging on pots and pans with John in front of your drunk Rose.

You snort. Dirk insists that he’s really good on a good pair of mixing bowls, and slaps a spatula down onto the back of your only clean frying pan.

You guess all that’s left is the Pokemon theme.

The three of you end up watching A Christmas Story. It’s not as good as you remember it, but that’s fine, because Rose falls sleep with her head on your shoulder and Dirk stops paying attention almost immediately, in stead doodling in his notepad some plans for something you can’t even understand. John is on he edge of the couch that is also a bed, staring at the tv like a kid in his Spiderman onesie.

All in all, a successful Christmas if ever you’ve ever had one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> john escalates shit uncontrollably with seemingly no consequences
> 
> i lied abt the chapter lag i guess. school let up very suddenly. so. thanksgiving break is coming up soon
> 
> i didnt think this thing was as long as it is. uh. oops ??? idk how many chapters are let but we've definitely crossed into the ending portion.


	7. ghost bro

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> man bro is just haunting this shitty holiday from his fucking grave, isnt he

Dirk packs his things up later that night and then helps you pack Rose’s things, since she’s asleep on the futon next to John, who didn’t make it to the end of the Spongebob Christmas special. His glasses get all crooked, and he rolls over and slaps Rose right on the face. She wakes up for about two seconds, turns over, and goes back to sleep.

“Hey, lil' bro,” Dirk says. You jump when his hand hits your shoulder, the living room dark, illuminated by the spongebob DVD menu screen. You turn to look at him.

“Yeah, bro?”

“You did good,” he says. His approval is the closest you’ve ever gotten to Bro’s approval. It's weird, even now, to associate someone as rad as Dirk with someone as bad as Bro, but you guess they'll never stop being father and son. You put your arm around his shoulder and rest your face on the top of his head. “It was a good christmas this year.”

“I’m sorry about the bad one,” you mumble.

“It's okay,” he says. “I forgive you.”

And you don’t say anything else, because you don’t think you can. When Bro died, Dirk was the only one in the hospital to see it happen. Later, after he started talking to you again, he told you that it didn't even look like Bro. It wasn't even him in that hospital bed, it was some kind of gross, half empty shell. Then he started crying. And while you may not have been obligated to love Bro, you made Dirk watch him die alone. On Christmas.

Bro is exactly the kind of asshole who would die on Christmas. That's some storybook shit, like he had to go out in the most damaging way he could, exactly when Dirk should have been happy. What a dick.

You're the kind of asshole who would let that happen to your brother.

You hold Dirk tight.

“John’s a real catch,” he says, suddenly, uncomfortable with the sentimentality. “He cares about you.”

“I know,” you sigh, hurting a little more than you want to let on, because you got too close to him and here you are, the dumbass who fell into this romcom trap.

“I know that you two aren’t actually dating,” he says. You freeze.

You go stock fucking still, unsure of what to even say.

“Uh, yes we-”

“Dave, I ran a background check on him. I noticed that his Facebook relationship status was single.”

You swallow. God fucking damn it. So much for covering your tracks.

“Why didn't you say anything?”

He shrugs. “I didn’t want to embarrass you. I figured if you were going to lengths like that to put on a show for me and Rose, maybe...maybe we were comin’ on a bit strong,” he sighs. He chews his lip and rubs his temples, and you notice the lines on his forehead, and the way he sounds like your Bro when he talks like this, all adult and sad. “We just got worried. Didn’t mean to...make you feel bad. About who you are, or who you’re dating, or anything at all.”

“...Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, it’s our fault. If you’re happy the way you are, then keep bein’ the way you are. If romance ain't your thing, now or ever, that’s fine, too. I just...we just...wanted to know you were doing okay. That you weren't alone, I mean...after Bro, and after...all this.”

“Actually," you scoff, staring at the pile of Rose and John lying out on the futon, holding Dirk close. “Something funny happened.”

“What's that?” Dirk asks.

“I sort of have a crush on him now. Like, a major one, like, fuck...I got it bad, man. And we’re fake dating.”

He snorts and smiles that wolfish, winning smile that runs in your family but never touched you. “Yeah, that IS funny.”

Silence passes for a bit.

You appreciate holding him, for probably the last time until next Christmas. You never get to do it, he never lets you, it's not his style. You appreciate all of this. This is so much better than last year. It feels like a door is opening, like your empty, sad apartment is full of new life, and you hate to see them go. You feel guilty for assuming that he and Rose were just going to...mock you or something. You feel guilty, but you say nothing.

After a while, he pats you on the back, and kicks John out of the futon so he can go to bed. John, bleary eyed with pillow marks on his cheek, mutters something about being woken up during a dream.

You crawl into bed, and John follows you. John is also going home tomorrow. He won’t sleep in your bed tomorrow. He won’t be as far away as Dirk and Rose, but you’ve grown accustomed to having him here.

Not that the prospect of having your apartment back to yourself doesn’t please you, it’s just that now that has actual consequences. You’ll have your space back, but they won’t be in it any more.

“A nickel for a cuddle?” you ask John.

“I paid you back, asshole. You don’t have to bribe me,” he snorts, and rolls over, throwing an arm over your neck. He breathes out and the two of you just face each other. He looks weird with his glasses off.

“Hey, John?”

“Yeah, dave?” he mocks back at you, doing his best Dave impression. Which is terrible, because his voice is so distinct, and because he’s bad at impressions.

“Why did you suck my dick?” you ask, because it is a question that has been on your mind a lot lately. A lot. A lot a lot.

He stares at you and then snorts. “I dunno, dude! Why do you have to ask? it’s weird.”

“I don’t think me not asking about it makes it any less weird,” you reply.

“I don’t know! Do I have to have a reason for everything?”

“It would help with my many, unanswered questions about our relationship,” you reply, and he freezes, staring at you. His eyes search yours, and you can see him backpedaling, as if he has any right. You don't back down.

“Dave, I…”

“I mean, have I been getting mixed signals?” you ask, unsure if now is the time. Maybe it’s not, but you have to know. “I don’t feel like a blowjob and a full refund can be misinterpreted.”

“I mean, I don’t know! Why do you have to ruin a good thing?” he asks, rolling over, arm removed. He rubs his eyes. You get a little pissed.

“You’re so obtuse,” you grunt.

“Me?!” He says, propping himself up on his elbows to glare at you, and now you KNOW you’ve started some shit, because there will be no sleeping when he is using that tone. “You’re the one who decided we should fake date, and then you get weird about me like...doing dating things. Like, when I sucked your dick, it wasn’t some elaborate scheme to use a wedding band as a cock ring,” he grouses.

“My dick is too big for that,” you reply. Your dumbass mouth does not know when to take things seriously.

“Just…” he sighs. “I didn’t think you’d be the one to, y’know...care about commitment.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” you growl.

“Just that-! I don’t know, you had this whole scheme, and you didn’t seem to mind all the casual shit, so I figured...maybe you just hadn’t gotten laid in a while...and, you know, I like sex, so why not?” he jabbers, and you realize, belatedly, that you’ve been getting the wrong signals form him. He obviously thought the two of you were on the same wavelength, and you obviously weren't.

Too bad he’s wrong, and you’re the sappiest, clingiest piece of shit to ever live.

“I just thought maybe we could have a good time together. That’s all.”

That’s all.

You see the exact moment when he realizes he’s struck a nerve.

You push your face into your pillow. You are not crying.

“Dave, are you crying?” he whispers, sounding like he’s just stabbed you or something.

“No,” you reply, muffled by the pillow. You are not crying.

“Dave, oh my God,” He says, pulling at your arm. “Dave, look at me, man!”

“No,” you shudder. You are not going to be seen like this. You are too cool to cry, because...because you feel used, or betrayed, or like an idiot, or SOMETHING, when you have no right to. Because obviously all of this was fake! Obviously! Of course it was! From day one, it was even your idea!

You are the asshole for having feelings!

“Dave, Dave, Dave,” he chants, quietly, in his shitty little voice, unsure and obviously confused. “C’mon, man, look at me,” he says, trying to push you so that you’ll roll over, but you just take the pillow with you, smashing it down onto your face. You can’t really breathe, but you don’t care. You are going to smother any potential sobs to death so he can’t hear them.

“Fuck off,” you grumble.

“No, I won’t! Look at me!” he says, suddenly yanking the pillow away from you so hard it actually shocks you, and then he’s just leaning over you with it in his hand, staring down at you in the dark.

“Uh,” he mutters. “Are you okay?”

"Obviously!” you rasp, voice wet. "Obviously I’m fucking fine!”

“Dave, don’t-!”

“I’m fine, so drop it, okay?!” You snarl, and roll over, even without any pillow. You don’t care. Fuck him. The sheets are cold on this side of the bed.

“Dave...I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to…” he says, his voice smaller than it has ever been. “I didn’t think it mattered.”

“It didn’t."

You lay there for forever. John just rolls over. His foot does not touch your leg. You do not cry. You do not even think about how stupid you are for every single thing you have felt these past few days, and how fast this all went by, and what a good mood you were in earlier. Now it’s all fucked and you don’t even care.

Serves your dumb ass right for having feelings.

When you wake up, John is not in the bed. You can hear Dirk and Rose in the living room, and you don’t want to get up, but you have to. You have to see them off. You check your bedside clock; Rose’s plane leaves in three hours. You sigh. You have to drive her to the airport.

“Dave,” Rose says, gently, pushing the door to your room open. “Coffee’s ready,” she murmurs, softly, and you know immediately that she knows something happened. You groan, smashing your face into your hands. Great, now this shit is going to get paraded around in front of these two. As if the humiliation wasn’t bad enough already.

“Thanks, Rose,” you reply. She just nods, and closes the door discreetly behind her, already fully dressed and ready to go. You guess you wouldn’t want to stick around in an atmosphere like this either.

You trudge out of your room and find Dirk sitting on the couch, which has been folded up from it’s previous bed configuration. He gives you a look, amd you try to ignore it, especially after that heart to heart with him last night.

John is nowhere to be found. You do not ask where he is. You get coffee, and sit down on the couch next to Dirk, staring at the wall.

“So,” Dirk begins, drumming his fingers on his knee. “John left this morning.”

“I noticed he was gone,” you reply, evenly, thankful that you at least don’t sound too distraught.

“lovers quarrel?” Rose asks, sitting down in the chair opposite the couch, nursing her own cup of coffee.

“He’s a prick and I hate him,” you snort, sipping your coffee. “We broke up.”

Dirk swallows very loudly. Rose’s eyebrows go up on her head and she looks shocked, her mouth going slack.

“What?” she says. She looks at Dirk, who, to his credit, doesn’t reveal anything.

You sigh. You lean forward and rub your temples, elbows resting on your knees. It’s chilly, and it’s making the hair on your legs stand up.

“Rose, we were never dating,” you grumble. “I paid him to pretend to date me so you guys wouldn’t hassle me over it.”

You can’t look at her face. You feel bad for lying to her, and to Dirk. You feel Dirk’s hand on your shoulder.

“Oh, no, Dave,” she whispers, in that way that tells you for sure that she thinks this is her fault.

“You didn’t make this happen,” you say, “I did. I fucked up.”

“Dave, I’m so sorry-” Rose starts, but you cut her off.

“No, I’m sorry. I’m sorry your last morning here had to be spent with me...moping around like such a fucking asshole. God….”

“What happened, bro?” Dirk asks, very quietly and very sweetly.

You sigh. “Okay, so...things got a little heavy, and I thought maybe he liked me. He didn't,” you swallow. “End of story.”

“Oh, jesus,” Rose says.

“I’m gonna kill him,” Dirk growls. You shake your head.

“Wasn’t his fault,” you say, voice wet again, and fuck, you’re gonna cry, aren’t you?” “My fault...”

"Dave…” Rose murmurs, and walks over to kneel in front of you and wrap both her arms around your shoulders, Dirk’s warm hand splayed out across your back. You sob into her shoulder because you’re the pathetic asshole who lost his boyfriend.

“You always care so much,” she mutters, in that soft, motherly tone she takes with you from time to time. “You always do.”

For once, Dirk says absolutely nothing about being tough or staying true to the Strider name. He just pats you, like you’re a baby, an extra large jumbo baby, and you really feel like the youngest right now. You really feel like the baby.

“Hey, hey,” Rose says, pulling back, one hand on each side of your face, thumbing a tear away, looking intensely at you with her pretty, purple eyes. “It’s okay. He’s not gone forever. You haven’t ruined anything.”

“Yes I have-”

“No you haven’t Dave, this isn’t your fault,” she replies, sternly. “You and John can still be friends, I know you can. You didn’t ruin anything, you didn’t do this. You don’t need to redeem yourself for something he did.”

Then she kisses your forehead.

You sob, and just sit there for a while.

“Have I ever told you guys that I have the coolest family in the world?” you sniff. “Because, like, wow. They’re mega cool.”

Dirk snorts. “Mega cool indeed.”

After that, Rose demands that you get some rest, and decides to take a cab, though she seems to want to stay, lingering in the doorway with her luggage. You hug her forever, and Dirk wraps his arms around bother of you. You apologize or making today about you, and she waves it off like it’s nothing.

Then it’s just you and Dirk. Dirk isn’t about words when it comes to this sort of thing. He’ll rant you an essay about lesbian horses, but when it comes to this, he’s tactfully silent. He just sits with you on the couch in amicable silence until you feel better about yourself, and when it’s time for him to go, he pats you on the back, and leaves with a “I love you.”

You are going to miss them. Your apartment is empty.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i think theres only one chapter left. i think that might be it
> 
> i might add some kind of epilogue bullshit at some point if yall r interested
> 
> HEY ive been trying to post the last chapter all god damn day but every time i preview it, the second half of it ?? disappears ??? uh. so. idk whats going to happen, if i cant fix it. um. i think it might be bc im copy/pasting from google docs, but. idk what the solution is, i have no idea how this website works, and the times when it doesn't work seem arbitrary


	8. back to brass tacks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> daves mopes and then he doesn't

You hate that you fall into the cliche, but you do. You guess some cliches are cliche because they're true, since all you want to do after everyone leaves is appease yourself with material goods, food, and some sad indie music. So you listen to sad indie music and eat sweets in bed next to a freshly purchased Scooby Doo chia pet that you don't even want. You can’t even work on sbahj. You can’t even work up the motivation to do that. It’s not like you’re even really sad. You don’t cry or anything, you just...don’t really feel much at all. God, this moved so fast, and now here you are, back to square one.

You guess that, all in all, you should be happy. Things are back the way you like them. You're alone in your apartment with some shitty food and access to a computer and, for you, that has always been the definition of happiness. Nobody in your hair, no chores to do, no stress. No people. 

It’s just so weird that he’s gone now, that it’s over, that he might not even be your friend any more. What if it’s just too awkward, what if you never stop being angry at him? Are you silly for being angry? You can’t look at this situation objectively when you can’t even look at yourself objectively.

You take three showers in a day just because standing under the water is relaxing and it's hard to think when you're half asleep. You talk to Karkat a little bit, but he’s busy and, despite his enthusiasm for discussing the gaping chasm that is your love life, has to work. You are overwhelmed with a desire to go home, but with nowhere to go, you finally cry. You cry because you got frustrated putting on a pair of socks and apparently THAT was the thing that was too much.

You walk around the city a bit by yourself. You think a lot about life in general. And, God, your life fucking sucks! It sucks without Dirk and John and Rose around. Maybe they weren't the solution, exactly, but they were a start. You forgot how easy life is when you have people in your corner, when you have friends. You forgot how good it feels. You get all introspective and moody, and you think about calling John a few times, but after getting angry at him every time you so much think his name, you decide that maybe now is a bad time. You feel bad for moping, and then you feel bad for feeling bad, because why do you have to care so much? Why did this have to mean so much to you when it obviously didn’t mean jack shit to anyone else?

A couple of days pass. Very little changes. Dirk and Rose don’t mention what happened, and are thankfully just supportive by being their usual selves. You appreciate that about them. They know when to take a step back and let you wallow. You start up sbahj again and the way your fans rejoice makes you forget about it for a little while. At least the internet respects you.

Why does this time of year suck for you? Like, what kind of cruel God decided that on the day of Jesus’ birth, only awful things would happen to you, ever?

You think about Bro, too, but you try not to. It’s hard to miss him when you barely knew him, but you feel like you should.

Things just pass in a blur. You don’t want to feel much, so you don’t. You hate that its so easy to tip you into feeling this way. You got like this when you first girlfriend dumped you in high school, and you haven’t changed. Maybe you’re the one who’s pathetic, stuck in his apartment, the exact same person he was when he was fifteen years old.

After a few days, your beard gets really out of control, and you make a decision. A big decision that is hard to make, but you make it anyway. You check John’s return address on the rumpled cardboard box from the christmas before last, tucked into your closet with some other mail garbage. You rustle it out and stare at it.

You stand in front of the mirror and slather shaving cream onto your face. If you’re going to do this, you’re going to look so good he’ll regret not dating you more than he’s ever regretted anything in his life. Or, at least, that’s what you tell yourself as you shave away your hard earned sadness beard.

It happens in total silence. You can hear the razor scraping against your skin, feel every hair. The tiny sound fills up your bathroom because there is no other sound. You never realized how quiet your apartment is when no one is in it, but now it blares at you. You stop in the middle of the process to put on some music, because it’s just too stressful to keep existing in silence like that.

The shaven hair hits the edge of the sink in clumps, and when you clear away the shaving cream with a towel to dab on aftershave, you feel oddly liberated. You feel a little bit better. You look a little younger, and you feel like you can open your eyes all the way for the first time in a while. You snag yourself with the razor once, and when you touch the little red spot, you draw back with a dot of blood on your fingertip. You promise to the hair in the sink that, starting today, you aren't going to feel like this any more.

After that, it’s still another two days of upkeep before you work of the nerve to actually drive to John’s apartment complex. You have to resolve this, and he isn’t making the first move. Obviously, because he hasn’t called or pestered you once since he walked out on you, which is sounding douchier and douchier to you with each passing day. You are fucking PISSED at him. He was your friend. Even if he didn’t feel anything for you romantically-and you want to hold out hope that he might’ve-he could have at least…you don’t know, sat through an awkward conversation instead of just...leaving you like that.

You drive to his apartment. It rains. Your windshield wipers push the water away. It’s cold, but not cold enough to freeze the rain just yet, so that air is crisp and chilly and it wakes you up. You’ve been a moping sad sack these past couple of weeks, but that stops today.

John's apartment building is larger then yours, but not really very much nicer. When you pull up to it, you coach yourself in the car, trying to remember how scathing your angry speech is going to be. You thoughts just bat around in your head like hornets, though, too angry to organize. You want to tell him how much all of this sucked, to make it suck for him as much as it sucked for you, but you can't even find the right words to do that.

You stomp to his door on shaking legs and knock twice. You hear the sound of the chain lock being undone and the doorknob turning. When he opens it, he looks as shocked as you feel.

“Um-” you start, looking him up and down. His eyes are wide behind his glasses and his lips are slack, staring up at you like a deer in the headlights, half afraid and half...more afraid.

"You shaved you beard,” he rasps, dazed and baffled like he’s on another plane of existence. He still looks cute on a way that churns your stomach, and he’s...still himself.

He’s still John. He didn’t transform into some kind of super villain asshole overnight, he didn’t somehow become repulsive to you. You don’t see him any different. You still like him.

And boy, does that hurt. You still fucking like him.

“Yeah, I, uh…” you start. This isn’t going how you pictured it going at all. You're too shaky. The anger is gone as soon as you see him. It breaks away from the hurt and the embarrassment, just a thin coating barely containing something else, and you realize that maybe all you’ve ever been doing is trying to cope with how much it sucked to have your feelings thrown back in your face like that. You remember that you're wearing the shades he gave you, and curse yourself a little bit.

His face scrunches up, and at first you think he’s angry, but then...everything changes. His shoulders go from squared to sagging, and his whole face distorts. His eyes squint and his eyebrows draw together, his mouth tightening into a line. You know that face, you’ve seen it a million times. You put your arms out without really meaning to, like he’s a kid who scraped his knee at a playground and you, his injured best friend, are going to help him, even if he only fell off the monkey bars because he pushed you off first.

"I really liked your beard,” he croaks, suddenly, and some invisible weight pushes down his whole body like some kind of tidal wave. You see him physically let go, and it’s like watching a tornado touch down. You feel flattered, distantly. He liked your beard.

He throws his arms around you and slams his face into your chest, not even breathing, but shaking slightly like a fawn. You feel betrayed, but also like maybe, if he was hurting too, you still have common ground with him. Maybe you weren't being ridiculous if he also felt this bad, even if he couldn't possibly have the right. You stand there, mortified, as the person who you assume is his roommate pokes her head out from the doorframe to watch, eating a bowl of cereal.

She walks away almost immediately, turning on her heel and flouncing comically in the other direction like she'd just witnessed a crime, but wasn't a snitch.

“John, hey,” you say, trying to pry him off of you and trying to come off harsh. This wasn’t what you expected. You feel a little cheated, honestly, out of your vindictive rant and out of your righteous fury, but you’re so disarmed that you can’t even form a coherent thought, and mostly you just want to see his face.

He looks up at you and his eyes are red and puffy and his nose is running. He sniffs and wipes it on the sleeve of his shirt with an unattractive little snorting noise. He looks down, and takes a step back.

“Sorry,” he says, weakly, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose, flushed and looking anywhere but at you. “I didn’t mean to do that.”

You stare at him, watery eyed and starstruck, for a long time.

“You cried too, huh?” you ask, smiling wryly.

“Yeah,” he admits. “Pretty much every night since I, uh, left,” he mutters.

"You're a fucking asshole,” you finally say, just like you wanted, except it sounds a lot less righteous coming out of you now that you're saying it in real life, to his contorted, miserable face.

“I know,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

“Why did you do that?” you ask, still standing there outside his door like a waiting prince charming.

“I don’t know, man! I guess...I didn’t realize you actually liked me, and then when I saw yo crying, I just...I felt so bad, Dave!” he says, running his hands through his hair and leaning on the doorframe in his little Shadow over Mordor shirt. “I knew it was my fault. I knew I made you feel like that. And I thought...God, John, since when do you do this to people? Oh, right, always, because you're a prick,” he says with a humorless little giggle. It’s weird, hearing his voice with absolutely no humor in it.

“It wasn’t completely your fault,” you say.

“Yes it was,” he sniffs. “I mean, I may have misread some signals, but I should never have just assumed...I should have asked you. And I shouldn’t have chickened out like I did, I just thought...no, fuck it, I didn’t think anything, it wasn’t for anyone’s good, I was just being a big fucking...baby. I'm sorry I made you come all the way out here, I...fuck!”

“Talking about it might’ve been a good first step,” you reply, trying to keep the discussion in good humor, but failing.

“Dave, I’m so sorry, man,” he says, shaking his head and rubbing his face.

“I just felt...used, I guess,” you reply, mumbling and trying not to seem as pathetic as you feel. “Like, I fell pretty quick, and there you were, just...getting what you wanted and getting out, I guess. And then it was just...so embarrassing to have you watch me cry over it when you didn’t even...y’know.”

“I wan’t going to abandoned you, Dave, jesus,” he protests, looking up at you with tired, red eyes. “I just thought….we were doing some friends with benefits thing. I mean...what’s a blowjob among friends, right? Haha...no homo, and all that.”

“You’re a dick,” you say again.

"I know,” he says, again.

“This Christmas was really nice until the end part,” he mutters. “I liked the middle bits the best.”

“Me too,” you reply. “Can I come in?”

"Sure, sure,” he says, quickly ushering you inside. His roommate has seemingly retreated to her room.

“Who’s your roomie?” you ask, unsure of how to even start this conversation. Opening this can of worms is so stressful.

“Oh, uh...that’s Latula, she’s cool. Um...you wanna go to my room?" he asks, smiling weakly. You nod. You don’t really absorb anything about your surroundings because you’re too busy both feeling relieved and incredibly stressed about being in his presence again.

You're unused to taking such a formal tone with him. Suddenly you’re walking on eggshells and you have never had to before. Not with him.

You follow John down a hallway and he invites you into his bedroom. The walls are plastered with posters for movies and vide games, and his computer is a hulking desktop mass, clearly something he built himself. There’s a cyntiq tablet tucked into the corner, and a laptop folded on the bed. Nothing but tech. His bedspread has some nerdy shit on it, and there are about five pairs of nike sandals kicked unceremoniously off next to it.

On his bed is the rabbit you gave him from that movie he hates. You try not to smile

“You can, um, sit wherever you like,” he says, scratching the back of his neck and looking around his room like he forgot what it looked like between answering the door and right now.

You aren’t even sure if you’re allowed to sit on his bed, which feels bizarre, considering ah the two of you shared one quite a lot before.

“Thanks,” you say, and sit down on the bed anyway. He walks over and joins you. The two of you sit together and stare at shit for a while, neither of you really super eager to reveal any more of your vulnerable, withered little souls to each other.

“Um,” he starts. “I’m really sorry about what I did. I shouldn’t have just...fucking, I dunno, solicited you for sex so suddenly, and without really talking about it first,” he mumbles. “That was shitty of me. And then I ran out afterward, which was just….crappy, and bad of me as a person.”

“It was a blowjob, not a wedding band,” you say, blankly and somewhat spitefully.

“No, it was more than that, I,” he sighs. You perk up, your feelings slightly validated. “I kissed you and I shared a bed with you and somehow it never occurred to me that you might, y’know...develop feelings. Of a romantic nature.”

“Right,” you respond.

“I’ve always been like this, Dave, “ he sighs. “I’m bad at romance. I always have been, I just...am clueless, I don’t pick up on any of this shit. I know I hurt you, and I didn’t...I never wanted to. I thought we were just having fun. I promise I wasn’t trying to, like...string you along or use you, that’s just kind of how I’ve always done things, at least after Vriska. I haven’t had an actual serious romantic relationship outside of that, and that was a highschool dating situation. I haven’t really matured since then, I guess. I just figured we were...I dunno, pals doing each other favors," he says. Then he snorts. “Or just doing each other, I guess, but that’s fucking...dumb, sorry I said that.”

“We were, there for a while. Pals, I mean,” you reply, smiling at him. He smiles too.

“I really like you a lot,” he says, suddenly. “Dude, I don’t want this to be...the end. Of this or us or whatever. I don’t…”

“It would be easier to let it go,” you say, almost against your will. “It would be easier to just let this go and let it be awkward and die out.” You have to give him an out. You can’t pressure him into anything just because he doesn’t want to make you feel bad, or just because he feels guilty.

“No,” he says. “No, I don’t want that. I like what we...sort of had, what we starting to, y'know, get going.”

“Do you want to actually...I mean, do you even like me that way? You know, like, as a boyfriend, not just...a buddypal fuckchum or whatever you call it.”

He laughs out loud. “Palhoncho! Jesus!” he breathes, grinning at you, his usual brightness muted. “I don’t know. I think I do, but how do you even tell something like that? I have no frame of reference for this, Dave, I’ve been in one entire relationship in my life. You’re the one who knows what he’s doing, I’m just...fuckup after fuckup,” he says, sighing and running his hands through his hair really hard, tugging it slightly.

“I guess this is it,” he says. “This is the part where we choose.”

“Right,” you reply. “What's it going to be?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know. Do you trust me still?”

You look at him, trying to figure it all out. “I don’t know. I think I do, but...once bitten, twice shy, I guess.”

“You’re a baby,” he says, but it doesn’t sound condescending, just warmly affectionate. He hesitantly reaches out and puts his hand on your cheek, and you lean into the touch almost impulsively, pressing into his open palm.

“You face is so smooth now,” he says, quietly and reverently. You feel his thumb rub over your cheekbone, and you can faintly smell his cologne and laundry detergent.

His other hand pushes your shades up onto the top of your head, pinning your fringe back with them, and you look at him in earnest. You must look like shit, but you don't care. He's already seen you at your worst.

He’s leaning in, and you close your eyes before his lips even meet yours. When they do, it’s slow and gentle and hesitant and scary. God, you're so tired, so exhausted, but you're finally here, this is finally happening. It's like finishing a marathon. You hear every little wet sound your lips make when they part and come back together, tongues barely touching, skin hot, cheeks flushed. It feels like your whole body is blushing.

You let him push you back onto his stupid bed with the stupid nerd bedspread and the bunny that gets turned away so it doesn’t have to watch the two of you go against the will of Jesus Christ. You giggle a relieved, nervous little laugh into the kiss and hold him, hesitant and raw and somehow overjoyed. You trust him this time. You trust that this time is different. You believe he wouldn’t hurt you. You believe he wouldn’t do this if it wasn’t real. Not this time.

And that’s the risk, you guess. Just believing. Choosing to care about someone and just having faith that they care about you too, enough to do the right thing by you, and maybe even caring about them enough to forgive them if they don’t. You choose to trust John Egbert, and along with that choice, you sort of also agree to the fine print that says you love him.

The kiss never gets hungry, but it stays quietly passionate and familiar. You feel him drive into you in a way he didn’t before, in a way that’s more than obligation or lust. There's comfort and understanding in the gentleness of his hands, the way he moves so slowly and deliberately. It feels like you’re being kissed by someone who loves you.

You glow. You glow underneath him like you’re a sparkler on the fourth of July, tiny but bright.

Everything he does that would annoy you about anyone else endear you to him, somehow, like he’s just completely magnetic without ever meaning to be. He isn’t traditionally attractive, and you don’t think he’s really even as good of a person as you thought he was. But that’s just a part of him, a part of this person who you picked for yourself. Nobody is as good as they want to seem. You feel privileged to know for certain that he isn't.

He pulls up, breathing on you and looking down at your face, searching your eyes, a pinkness to his cheeks, a tiredness to his eyes.

“Made up your mind yet?’ you ask, smiling up at him, sure he can see all of your teeth. It isn't a smirk or a Strider half smile, it's a smile smile. The kind you don't share enough because your braces didn't do a perfect job and you always felt like it made you seem weak or gullible. You're so sure he'll love the smile you hate that you hand it off to him like a diamond you're trying to pass off as simple coal.

“Yeah,” he replies. “Sorry it took me so long,” and then he leans down again, catching you in another soul stealing kiss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i think theres actually supposed to a whole extra chapter but. i might call it at this, honestly. after this they just talk more, bang, and then dave wanders around johns apartment for a little while and its over. tbh i just feel bad for spending so little time on johns living space when im sure it was the more interesting of the two
> 
> so anyway ! depending on what i decide to do there may or may not be another chapter followed by an epilogue. the epilogue is for sure i just dont know if the last chapter actually adds anything tot he story at all

**Author's Note:**

> WELL this is actually written in its entirety already. it tops out at about 25k words. so it will eventually reach an end


End file.
